


The Trickiest Fixations

by Like_a_Hurricane



Series: Pernicious Prompting [29]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aesir are not born with daemons but most mages eventually summon theirs, Avengers Remix, Daemons, Dark Elves probably didn't have them at all, F/M, Fire Jotunn aren't born with them but they all seem to have them, I try not to think about how many times I've rewritten this film so far, Let's do the time warp again, M/M, No one knows why, Thor may or may not think of Mjolnir as his daemon secretly, a bit fix-it, most of the rest of HDM is not exactly canon here plot-wise but cultural and mythical aspects a bit, only Elves and Humans are born with them, or how, sorry I couldn't fit in the bears, the same goes for Jotunns and Dwarves and Vanir, think about it: he is like the only non-mage in the family, witches are totes a thing, with Marvel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-19 16:42:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 36,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2395469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Like_a_Hurricane/pseuds/Like_a_Hurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark has a slightly unusual––and perpetually aloof––daemon, by earthly standards, but he hadn’t expected to ever meet an alien, let alone an alien not only very suspiciously human-like, but also possessed of a daemon just as weird and shifty as Loki himself; although the real mystery seems to be why Tony’s daemon thinks Loki’s is incredibly fascinating and, despite years of ignoring most other daemons outside their closest friends, seems to irrationally want to be friends, really really badly.</p><p>A His Dark Materials AU, featuring different versions of daemons throughout the nine realms, including those of shape-shifting trickster god mages on the run from some of the scariest people in the galaxy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest, I've wanted to write this AU for years, and just hadn't come up with any ideas, until this last round of Pernicious Prompt acceptance on Tumblr, when this gem was submitted by the lovely Zapiarty:
> 
> "Prompt: His Dark Materials Daemon au with Tony's Daemon being a Phoenix. Despite Tony's playboy lifestyle his Daemon never liked anyone. Until Loki showed up. But Aesir don't have Daemons! Cue confusion on all sides."
> 
> I just didn't go with the phoenix bit, and tweaked the Aesir idea too, and added a bit more complexity to Tony's daemon's general aloofness. There was then lengthy discussion of what form Tony's daemon should take, amongst other things, and it's all been terribly fun ever since.
> 
> Most daemon names, I picked out of a hat, which is to say a list of "ooh shiny names" I've sort of accumulated over the past few years because that's apparently the sort of thing I do.

When Loki first landed in Midgard via the tesseract, while he was still steaming and crackling with the too-swift thawing of his own skin, he found himself down on one knee, in the middle of a platform deep beneath a top-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. base, spear in one hand, the other helping to support himself as he slowly uncurled his spine, raising his head as he straightened up, eyes dark and full of pain, but intensely shrewd and quickly brightening in alertness and bitter mirth alike.

S.H.I.E.L.D. agents here had all been briefed on extraterrestrial lifeforms. Most of them had been braced for the uneasiness they might feel upon meeting aliens who did not have visible daemons at their sides. Loki did look almost human, once he lifted his head and began to rise to his feet slowly, vapor and smoke still coldly rolling off of him; and yet, there was almost a tangible release of some little tension through the whole of the room when a scaly black head lifted from beneath the trickster’s chest-piece, where his magic and the toughness of his armor had kept his daemon warm and close enough to survive the journey with him, even cold-blooded as this form rendered her. She could remain _close_ , as she did then, draping herself about Loki’s neck to observe them all.

Then the relief swiftly evaporated, as Nick Fury ordered, “Sir, please put down the spear!”

The god tilted his head, seemed to look at the glowing, bladed weapon as though he had forgotten all about it until then, at which point he abruptly lashed out with it, and shot out a deafening blast of energy. The calamitous cacophony of chaos that ensued then did not cease until all humans in the room save for Nick Fury himself had been converted into amenable servitude, or lay incapacitated for a while, if not actually dead or dying.

Then Nick tried to leave with the tesseract.

“Please don’t. I still _need that_ ,” Loki told the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., in what were almost gentle tones, except for the hollow madness in them.

Fury was disturbed to see the black serpent daemon around the god’s neck––a cobra, if his eye served him right––suddenly uncurl from him and tumble down, only to change form into that of a massive black- and brown-furred wolf with the same fiercely bright yellow-gold eyes that the snake had displayed. Her lips pulled back in a snarl showing long white teeth. She was pressed close alongside one of the trickster’s long legs, bristling with threat as a hellish noise rumbled up from her chest.

Clearly, alien daemons didn’t seem to follow the same rules as human ones. Nick’s raven daemon, perched upon his shoulder, gave an outright scandalized and angry caw at the display. As ever, Nick could relate.

Loki’s grin only widened.

“This doesn’t have to get any messier.”  
“Of course it does,” countered the trickster. “I’ve come too far for anything else. I am Loki, of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

One of the other humans managed uprightness: a Dr. Erik Selvig, whose sugar-glider daemon peered out of his shirt’s left breast pocket. “Loki! Brother of Thor!”

The look the god of lies shot him was pure animal pain and deep resentment, and it caused the scientist’s life to suddenly flash before his eyes, as his every instinct told him he was about to die horribly.

Nick quickly interrupted the death-glare, “We have no quarrel with your people.”

“An ant, has no quarrel, with a boot,” drawled Loki.

“Are you planning to step on us?” the old soldier asked, offended.

“I come with glad tidings,” the god reassured, “of a world made free.”

“Free from what?”

“Freedom!”

Nick Fury made no sudden movements, and kept his breathing slow and deliberate, as he realized that he really was dealing with a complete lunatic. Possibly, the ‘god’ was in shock, from his journey, but this wasn’t paranoia or fear––well, no more than about 12% of it was; primarily, though, this was sweet salesmanship, showmanship, and _poison_.

“Freedom is life’s great lie,” Loki continued, stepping closer to Dr. Selvig slowly. “Once you accept that, in your heart-” He reached out, touched the tip of that scepter’s blade to Selvig’s chest and it sent pulse of energy through him––it shone in his eyes, taking them from white, to black, until the extremes swirled together and made for a cloudy and iridescent blue, just like Barton’s. “You will know peace,” the god sweetly promised.

This, the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. decided, was not the sort of crazy that should be anywhere near something like the tesseract, no matter what kind of self-proclaimed god or other super-powerful being Loki might be. The look that he and his daemon briefly exchanged confirmed his conviction, seeing in her posture and the way she cocked her head that his dear Andreija had reached the same conclusion.

“Yeah, you say ‘peace’; I kinda think you mean the other thing.”

Clint interrupted, then, after his own daemon whispered in his ear. The sparrow-hawk’s eyes, even more frighteningly transformed than the archer’s owns, were a uniformly pale blue from lid to lid, just slightly luminous when not in direct light. “Sir, Director Fury is stalling. This place is about to blow and drop a hundred feet of rock on us. He means to bury us.”

“Like the pharaohs of old,” Nick concurred.

“He's right. The portal is collapsing in on itself. We've got maybe two minutes before this place goes critical,” Dr. Selvig added.

“Well then.” The trickster shot Clint a pointed look, and his wolfish daemon cocked her head towards Fury.

The archer promptly shot Nick Fury down, and Loki then strode past the Director, letting one of his new minions grab the briefcase with the tesseract in it for him along the way. Loki’s daemon may have waited a moment before following, just long enough to meet the gaze of the raven daemon where she was not-quite-concealed by the Director’s body. The wolf emitted a cruel chuckle before she darted away to catch up with her dear god of chaos, whining a bit when he stumbled, and immediately pressing close as she could to his side again, letting one of his hands gain an almost-painful death-grip on her fur, at the base of her neck, while his minions further helped him regain his physical balance as well.

He shook less, once he’d had tight hold on her again for several seconds, and he managed to let her go again, briefly, when they passed Maria Hill, only to settle one arm around her once she joined him in the truck-bed of the vehicle Barton led them to.

She stayed low, curled around his legs, once people started shooting at them.

She stayed close-close-close as they could manage, and still keep surviving. She knew it was the only thing keeping her trickster from collapsing before they reached a place to setup a secure base of operations. _Just a little longer_ , she thought loudly, wishing he could hear her over the wind if she said it aloud. Closing her eyes tighter when a few projectiles came too close, she didn’t even have to think when the god reached down to grasp her neck again. She shifted back into snake-shape and his fingers moved to maintain his hold on her with practiced ease, allowing her to disappear under his coat-sleeve and slither down it to settle herself again behind his chest-plate, sharing his armor.

_Just a little longer, now. We can make it._

“I know,” Loki growled, close to where her head poked out from under his collar.

She sighed a little, appreciating that when they needed it like this, their bond let them be heard so, and she waited, trembling a little with each blast and crack of sound that barraged them. When it did stop, she almost refused to believe it, hearing sounds of fire and cracking bones in the whipping of the wind as their driver picked up speed.

“We’re clear,” the trickster rasped, lowering himself back down into the truck bed, until he was mostly out of the wind.

His daemon poked her head up at him, and he smiled a bit bitterly at her, until her forked tongue flicked out against his chin and drew a small, weak hiss of a genuine laugh from him again, for the first time in weeks.

 _Just a bit longer_. They both knew.

 

~~

 

Steve Rogers’ daemon was a golden retriever who preferred to go by the pet-name ‘Izzy’ rather than his full name (which he had been amused and seemingly a bit relieved to discover––upon his and his human’s defrosting––had managed to evade historians to this day) and he was confused and horrified a bit by Loki’s daemon.

Of course, Izzy was also confused and horrified by the trickster himself, too, but this daemon, so ancient and yet still _shifty_ seemed unnatural to him and more alien than he had really been expecting, all informational briefings on the topic notwithstanding.

Vicious and far too clever as she was, Na’ilah Lokissdaemon (as she had introduced herself shortly before slashing at his face with long claws) was still more disturbing. Her panther-shape was just as experienced and powerful and controlled as her wolf-shape. Her beak and talons when she took the form of a massive grey-and-white bird very much like a harpy eagle had rained down agony upon him until a rocket-strike from Iron Man sent the tricksy daemon careening in the same direction as Loki had been propelled by a repulsor-blast, so that the pair of shape-shifters crashed together in a heap and landed in the same spot: the god and his frightful eagle-shaped daemon.

“Make your move, Reindeer Games,” Tony warned, through the suit’s external speakers.

Loki raised his hands, palms-forward, in a gesture of silent surrender, while the yellow-eyed eagle changed from raptor shape into one of a magpie instead, and perched on his right thigh as the god's armour downgraded to Asgardian formal and his horned helmet vanished. Once the after-image of more warlike garb was fully dissipated, Na'ilah lowered her head in a show of respect that seemed only a little bit sarcastic.

“Good move,” Iron Man approved, some of the weapons bristling from his armor retracted, apparently appeased. His faceplate and some of the plating high about his neck and shoulders rose, revealing the inventor’s face, and the furry head of his fox daemon about his neck lifted a little to sniff the air intently.

Steve stepped up behind him, Izzy once more at his side. “Stark,” he greeted.

Tony nodded at him, but didn’t take his eyes off Loki or even turn to face him, muttering an equally curt, “Captain,” in response.

“Fury didn’t tell me he was calling you in.”

The inventor turned and shot him a bitter ‘welcome to the real world’ sort of arrogant smirk. “Yeah. There’s a lot of things Fury doesn’t tell you.”

 

~~

 

Daemons settle after puberty. This much was commonly known to everyone on the planet Earth. There were rare exceptions, perhaps a few every generation, but none quite like Loki’s daemon. It was particularly puzzling to everyone around S.H.I.E.L.D. because apparently the alien’s big blond brother, Thor, had no daemon at all, and nor had his companions, Sif and the Warriors Three, seen during the attack wherein the Destroyer leveled on a small New Mexico town.

Then there were some cases like Tony Stark’s daemon, Aysel. She was a red fox, by species. She was just... seasonally changeable. Except that her changes in color-scheme didn’t actually seem to have a _regular pattern_. There were entire conspiracy websites devoted to making interpretations of how major events in Tony Stark’s life might correlate with the changes.

It had honestly started out innocently enough. She had been a vibrant red, at first: like bloodied rust, with jet-black legs, white down her chin to her chest and at the tip of her tail. Perfectly normal, for a fox. Except that over the first year after she had settled on fox-shape, she went from the the color of dried blood to a pale orange-tawny, and the black fur on her limbs seemed lighter. By the middle of the next year, her outer guard-hairs darkened to black, followed by the rest of her pelt, then began to show light silver dappling over different sections of her pelt for the rest of that year, until she went entirely mottled grey by the end of it. By the end of year three, she was white, but seeming to transition back towards tawny again. Eventually, the furor over the sheer novelty of it had given way to indifference, when no meaningful answers or insights seem to come from it.

There was a similar rise and then eventual trailing off of interest when, after Tony’s return from Afghanistan, the media first took notice of the minor fact that his daemon’s coloration remained ever-changing as always _except_ for a circle of white in the middle of her chest.

No one could actually explain why her colorations seemed disinclined to settle. Most foxes in the wild don’t change color so drastically, nor do most other fox daemons. Nothing else about Aysel was particularly unusual by daemon standards, other than the fact that her human happened to be Tony Stark, and belonging to one another as they both did, she was bound to be unusual no matter what.

Now, however, she was acting funny: twitchy and restless.

“What’s up, Ace?” Tony asked her quietly, once they boarded the quinjet and he stepped a bit away from Steve Rogers golden-boy glow. With his helmet under one arm and the shoulder-covering armor that allowed his daemon to rest along the back of his neck and shoulders where she was safe, when they suited up, Aysel would more usually just tuck her face against the side of her human’s neck and ignore everyone else around them. In fact, that was usually her normal behavior whether or not armor was even involved. Just as Tony didn’t like being handed things, his daemon just didn’t like being expected to deal with other people, ever since she had settled when Tony was fourteen. The only slight exceptions had been Pepper since she had moved in with them, and her continued close friendliness around Rhodey’s daemon, a Merlin named Kaia, with whom she had been wrestling and mocking and playing around with in general since long before they had settled on their final shapes.

Aysel was now fidgeting, twitching, shifting, and making occasional little annoyed growling noises as she strained from her perch to stare... toward Loki’s daemon, Tony realized. His stepping away from Steve and the pilot in her cockpit had accidentally moved her into a position she had to crane her neck a bit to see around armor and her own human’s head.

“Ace?”

She stilled and shot him an almost sheepish look. “Like you’re not fascinated.”

Tony raised both eyebrows. “Uh, a little.”

“What?”

“You usually don’t show much interest, is all.”

Her ears flicked back for a moment, her dark brown eyes––the only part of her colouring which had remained consistent even before the white circle appeared on her chest and seemed inclined to stay––narrowing in annoyance. “She’s anomalous.”

“Well, there is that.” Tony turned them both, stepping a little closer to the god of lies, who glanced up at him, as did Na’ilah, who was curled up at Loki’s feet, again in the form of a large black panther with fiercely bright yellow-gold eyes. The inventor was a bit stunned at the sounds of Aysel triggering the opening up and release of the remaining bits of armor she had still been connected into; she was a clever fox, after all, and had her own HUD through which she tended to aim and trigger some of the suit’s weapons herself, usually covering their backs while Tony and JARVIS focused on what lay ahead of them. Now free of them, however, she hopped down and strode right up to a potentially hostile shape-shifty alien’s equally shape-shifty daemon, who was restrained only by a collar that chained her to Loki’s seat.

Tony had the distinct feeling that, like the trickster she was bonded to, Na’ilah was humoring them by not escaping the laughable restraints they wore. Loki, after all, looked as though he were precisely where he wanted to be. His daemon probably was, too. Well, actually, on second glance the god currently looked a bit bemused and annoyed by the fox daemon’s approach, and shot Tony a frankly suspicious glare.

The inventor only shrugged helplessly. “Hey, wasn’t my idea.”

“He’s correct,” Aysel said, sniffing at the other daemon, not quite stepping within clawing distance, not that she would have been able to get away in time, if Na’ilah chose to abruptly pounce. This season, the little fox (she had always been just a little small by average red fox standards) was yellowish-gold, with dark grey lower legs, and grey-and-black guard hairs from the backs of her ears, down her spine to her tail, which was banded slightly between yellow and grey except for the pale white tip of it. She cocked her head slightly. “Why do you reek of fear and blood?”

“Why do you _think_ , little one?” Na’ilah rumbled, her speaking voice as smoky and polished as her owner’s, but softer, decidedly feminine and just a bit sultry. “We arrived here the hard way, after a great long fall.”

“Na’ilah,” Loki snapped, warning.

She shot him a look as though daring him to try and stop her, as her long tail began to flick in a manner that suggested any move he made to touch her might result in a nasty bite. “I’ve had hardly _any_ decent conversation since Gamora and Nebula got sent away with Ronan a month ago. Daemonless races all so insist on just talking to _youuu_ after all.”

Now he was glaring at her in earnest. “You are rarely ever so desperate for their attention, let alone so loose-tongued,” he snapped, in a language he knew no one on the plane would recognize. It was, after all, from Alfheim.

Tony glanced back over his shoulder, and noticed Steve was glaring at him, but Natasha seemed to say something (the inventor thought he could see her lips shape the word “rapport” but little more than that) that, while it made the star-spangled blond’s frown deepen a little, Izzy sat down after hearing it with a huff that suggested he expected to stay right where he was, with Steve, rather than interfere.

Great. Apparently Natasha was trusting him with what was technically more in her line of work: talking to the prisoner, maybe getting info. All because Aysel seemed to be unusually fixated on Loki’s unnaturally shifty daemon.

“Records don’t indicate that any other recent Aesir who visited Earth had daemons,” the fox chose that moment to remark. “What’s different about you?”

“It’s different, for _most_ other races in the nine realms,” the panther explained, “than it is for mortals. Only humans and Elves are born with their daemons at their sides, rather than housed only within their own hearts and souls throughout much of their lives, if not all. In order to meet one’s daemon, an Aesir, Vanir, Jotunn, or Dwarf must be a mage, and undergo particular rites in pursuit of self-knowledge, which is vital to the control of a mage’s natural powers. As a result, Thor is actually the only one in his immediate family who lacks a daemon. I personally think this is behind his, hmm, unusual degree of sentimental attachment to his hammer,” she stage-whispered, just a bit scathingly.

Tony coughed a laugh despite himself, at that.

That was when they heard a startled exclamation from Natasha along the lines of, “Where the heck did this come from?” Soon after, her lynx daemon grumbled under her breath about the weather not smelling right.

A massive rumble of thunder shook through the air around them, the whole quinjet rattling with it, and both Loki and his daemon suddenly wore uneasy looks, eyes flicking up ceiling-ward as they stilled and just... listened very carefully.

“What’s the matter?” Steve then asked. “Scared of a little lightning?”

Na’ilah snorted loudly in dismissal.

“I’m not overly fond of what follows,” Loki drawled.

Aysel chose that moment to scrabble almost cartoonishly right back up the outside of Tony’s armor to retake to her battle-station, because she could hear something flying towards them way too fast. “Helmet!” she snapped, as she herself triggered the protocols for the armor to close back up around her and Tony both, just in time for the inventor to snap the helmet back into place.

The whole quinjet rocked with the impact of one Thor, god of Thunder, hitting them and then forcing his way into the quinjet. He tore Loki out of the seat he was in, heedless of the seat-belts he destroyed in the process. He blasted Iron Man back when the inventor tried to interfere, seized his brother by the throat, and dove out of the plane with him. Na’ilah roared after him, and changed shape into a magpie to dive right after him, leaving the collar meant to restrain her behind, proving pretty definitively that they hadn’t really “captured” her, so much as provided she and Loki both with convenient, political-prisoner-grade airline services to their next planned destination.

“Oh hell no,” Tony growled as he leapt back to his feet and started to march toward the open end of the quinjet.

“Stark, we need a plan of attack!” Steve shouted to him.

“I have a plan: _attack_ ,” Tony retorted, and then leapt down after the pair of gods, leaving Steve to swear and grab for a parachute behind him.

 

~~

 

“Where is the tesseract?” Thor roared, as he threw his brother down.

Loki landed hard and skidded, scraping along stone, before finally coming to a halt, but his groan of pain turned quickly into bitter laughter. “I missed you too.”

“Do I look to be in a gaming mood?”

“Oh, you should thank me,” the trickster chided, as he struggled slightly to sit up. “With the bïfrost gone, how much dark energy did All-father have to muster to conjure you back down here at last, to your precious Earth.” He gestured expansively at the landscape around them with a cold mockery of a smile.

Thor flinched away from a raucous, deafening _aakkaakkak_ of a magpie-shaped daemon projectile swooping past near his ear, from Na’ilah, on her way to land beside Loki and chatter only a little less irritably at him, in a manner that informed the god that she was not at all impressed. The trickster snorted at her as he pulled himself to his feet and snarled, but didn’t struggle much when Thor grabbed the side of his neck.

Thor’s expression darkened, even as it cracked open a little with sentiment. “I thought you dead,” he said, voice hollow at the memory.

“Did you mourn?” Loki almost sneered.

“We all did. Our father-”

Quickly raising one forefinger, the trickster cut him off, “ _Your_ father.” He jerked back from his not-brother, then, putting a hand against his abused lower-back as he took a few steps away. “He did tell you of my true parentage, did he not?”

“Would’ve been nice to know maybe a thousand years or so sooner,” Na’ilah chimed in. “Just saying.”

Thor shot her a pleading look, hoping that the other half of his brother’s soul might be more willing to reason, but she took wolf-shape again and strode over to lean against one of Loki’s legs, and Thor could not guess at what might be on her mind, either. In the past, when he and his brother fought as much, much younger men, she would give him a hint, a glimmer of some faint hope that he hadn’t offended his brother one step too far that time. Then, eventually, she would almost seem commiserate with him, when Loki proved difficult. She was as much a closed book to him as Loki, and somehow that made it feel much more damning.

“We were raised together, we played together, we fought together. Do you remember none of that?” Thor pleaded.

“I remember a shadow,” Loki intoned gravely, “living in the shadow of _your greatness_. I remember you tossing me into an abyss, I who _was_ and _should be_ king!”

“So you would take this world I love as recompense for your _imagined_ slights?” Thor spat, all disappointment and disbelief.

Loki gaped at him, like he couldn’t begin to imagine what it might be like have a skull that thick. Na’ilah bristled from head to tail and snarled, “Are you serious, you absolute numb-skulled buffoon?”

“Na’ilah,” the trickster warned softly.

“This is why you are not ready even now to be any sort of king, _yourself either_ , Thunderer,” she growled. “You see ‘imagined’ slights, where I have seen and heard every whisper about us throughout Asgard, over hundreds of years, so many bitter lies, so much spite, all for your too-clever silver-tongued shadow, for that is all he was to them, for how little they bothered to learn of us. _You_ are so _loved_ by such idiots that you never see how quickly their love for you turns sour the moment they look upon us, outside of your presence. Long before we knew that Jotunnheim had been our true birthplace, we were already being treated as though others saw us as Jotunn-like: like monsters never to be trusted, only vilified.”

“Perhaps if you fought more honorably-” Thor began to roar.

“Do not _dare_ , Thor,” Loki snarled, then. “I fight with my weapons, and you with yours. Your musculature might make others swoon to behold, while my magic horrifies them, but these are matters of _taste_ , not _moral righteousness_. Would _you dare_ suggest that you were born inherently nobler than I, for lacking the gifts for mage-craft that made your father a great mage-king, and our mother one of the fiercest warriors amongst the Vanir long before she wed him?”

“Enough of this! You distract from the matter at hand. You have attacked this world, Loki. The Earth is under my protection!”

Raucous laughter escaped the god of lies, at that. “And you're doing a _marvelous_ job with that! The humans slaughter each other in droves, whilst you idly threat. I mean to rule them. And why should I not?”

“You think yourself above them?”

The trickster blinked at him. “Well, _yes_.”

“Then you miss the truth of ruling, brother. A throne would suit you ill.”

Loki snarled and shoved past him. “It is you who are blind, Thor, to the true nature of kings. You still respect your _father_ of all the menaces of all the realms. You _pathetic_ fool!”

“It is you who are a fool, to have loosed a weapon in this world that you cannot hope to control!”

“Oh, now, Mighty Thor,” Loki chided, low and hateful. “You would be better served not to underestimate how my powers have grown, in my exile, but I will hardly stop you. Do go ahead, continue to assume that I lack the knowledge and insight into the true power of the tesseract necessary to bend it to my purposes,” he mocked.

“Who showed you this power?” the Thunderer demanded. “Who controls the would-be king?”

“I _am_ a king!” Loki crowed.

“Not here!” Thor cried, seizing hold of his brother again just as before. “You give up the Tesseract! You give up this pointless dream!” He struggled to convey the fear and anger and love within him, all at once, as he almost pleaded, more than demanded of his brother: “You come _home_!”

After seeming, almost, to seriously consider it, Loki gave a single dismissive chuckle. “I don’t _have_ it.” When his brother threateningly raised Mjolnir, he simply added, “You need the cube to take me home, but I have sent it off I know not where,” and smiled gleefully at his brother’s frustration.

“Listen well, brother-”

And that was then the clever armor-clad mortal from before, in a blur of red and gold, hit Thor hard and sent him careening down to earth nearby.

Loki shrugged. “I’m listening.”

Na’ilah shot him a look. “Seriously?”

He smiled down at her. “I couldn’t resist.”

She rolled her eyes.

“What exactly, by the bloody Norns, possessed you to reveal what you did to that mortal’s little fox, dear?” he then asked her sharply.

Na’ilah’s tail wagged a little. “I like her.”

“You’re joking.”

She held his gaze steadily, while a series of explosions and banter erupted nearby. Both of them ignored it at first.

 

“ _Do not touch me again._ ”

“ _Then don’t touch my stuff_.”

 

That caused both the trickster and his daemon to turn their heads and stare a bit quizzically at the unfolding confrontation. “His what?” Loki asked, scandalized.

“His prisoner, I think, is what he meant. Probably.” She sounded amused.

 

_“You have no idea what you are dealing with!” Thor bellowed at the mortal._

_“Shakespeare in the park?” Tony gestured at him illustratively. “Dost mother know you weareth her drapes?”_

_“This is beyond you, metal man. Loki will face Asgardian justice!”_

_“He gives up the cube, he’s all yours. Until then.” His faceplate snapped back down. “Stay out of my way.” He started to turn away, then. “_ Tourist _.”_

_A lot of electricity, minor explosions, tree-damage and other violence ensued._

 

“You can’t keep his daemon,” Loki warned.

“Can’t we?”

“We?”

She emitted a low whine.

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Do you not remember the hours we spent pouring through classified S.H.I.E.L.D.  information while manipulating Dr. Selvig remotely through the tesseract?” Loki sighed.

“Well, I worked hard to try and forget the boring parts, but there were so many of them. I might’ve been overzealous in my forgetfulness.”

“Tony Stark’s dossier was one of the more entertaining parts.”

His daemon shrugged. “Clearly I’ve forgotten it, since then.”

“His daemon might not take kindly from being separated from not only Mr. Stark, but a Miss Pepper Potts. She’s mentioned many, many times in his files. They are romantically involved, quite seriously.”

Na’ilah drooped visibly.

Loki hesitated, deeply disturbed. “You... can’t seriously-”

“It’s nothing,” she snapped. “It’s fine.”

He shot her a look. “ _Na_ ’ilah.”

“ _Lo_ -ki,” she countered, mocking. “It was a passing... thought. Apparently. It hardly matters. Never-mind it, I suppose, that his daemon is solid as a mage’s. I’m sure it’s of no significance at _all_.”

The trickster hesitated. “What?”

“You noticed, did you not, that most of the mortals we’ve encountered have daemons which almost do not have physical bodies in a true sense? They are only Dust and a bit of this planet’s remaining natural magics, weak though they are compared to most other realms. Stark’s is different.”

“How so? I saw nothing amiss.”

“She is more like myself. She is as solid as though she had to be summoned from out of blood and fire, same as I. It’s not from magic, so far as I could discern. It’s... something else. Scar tissue, perhaps, from something that happened to their bond.” She looked sheepish for a moment. “I might have been looking forward to the puzzle, but it would require gaining their trust,” she admitted, her ears drooping a little again. “You just deflated my first two plans, and the others require coming back sometime after... various things.”

Loki nodded, thoughtful. “Only two? Well, clearly you’re not too far gone.”

“Ass,” she growled.

Loki reached out and scratched behind her ears, settling down beside her on the cliff, leaning against her a little where she too leaned on him, even, as they both watched the battle happening amongst the trees below. “Perhaps another time.”

She rumbled in a not-displeased way at that. “You’re right. Anytime soon would be pretty terrible timing.”

“Well, _yes_.”

“Later, I will _make you_ come back here,” she promised. “Once you’re...”

“I have little doubt.”

“Oh look, that little gold pup I mauled earlier and his pretty human just landed,” Na’ilah pointed out, highly amused. “With a blanket?”

“Primitive device to prevent certain death via falling from a great height, I think,” Loki suggested.

“Smartass,” his daemon muttered.

 

_“Hey, that’s enough!” Steve called, after getting the attention of thunder god and techno-mage both. He fixed his attention first on Thor: “I don’t know exactly what you plan on doing here.”_

_“I've come here to put and end to Loki's schemes!”_

_“Then prove it, and put the hammer down.”_

 

“Ooh, poor phrasing,” Na’ilah muttered.

“Indeed,” Loki concurred.

 

_Iron Man seemed to agree, “Um, yeah, no! Bad call! He loves his hammer-” He was cut off by the hammer knocking him backward._

_“You want me to put the hammer down?” Thor roared._

_The star-spangled soldier raised his shield and curled his entire body behind it just before the hammer-blow fell. The massive pulse of energy and the blast of light and lightning that burst outward from it, at the impact, even pushed back Loki and his daemon a little, making Loki whistle long and low, a little impressed._

 

As the heroes then emerged from the wreckage, Loki couldn’t help giggling.

 

_“Are we done here?” Steve asked. The others nodded, reluctantly._

 

~~

 

Steve had been convinced Loki would make a run for it. Thor had too.

Tony let them search however they wanted. He had a different hunch, and flew right to the spot Loki and Thor had been arguing at when he first tackled the thunder god. He wasn’t actually sure what he’d been expecting, but the trickster lounging on a rocky outcropping as though it were a throne, with a perfect view of the battleground and his daemon sitting leaned against his side in her wolf-shape, looking for all the world like they needed nothing more than a bucket of popcorn to make their lives complete... was a bit over-the-top even by Stark standards.

“Methinks the god of lies doth not protest enough,” Iron Man greeted, his faceplate flicking up as he landed.

Loki beamed at him. It was very scary, but also sort of indecently attractive, which the inventor decided to ignore.

“If I thought leaving you here would actually foil your plans at all, I’d consider it.”

“Ah, but it won’t, and your new companions would rather frown at your letting me go so easily, would they not?” Loki pointed out.

“Eh.” He shrugged. “Probably.”

“You hold them all in such _esteem_ , that I now clearly much fear them, seeing how much genuine respect they have so instilled in you,” the god deadpanned, sarcastic.

Tony snorted. “Well, they’re sort of idiots, but that’s why they bring me in. I’m more than genius enough to see through the likes of you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You’re playing a shell-game with us, and probably going to sabotage the helicarrier somehow, and I’ll probably have to fix some of the damages, eventually. Mind telling me where I can expect to need to start? Which engine first and how maybe?”

Loki’s smile widened further. “Would you not prefer to try and stop me?”

“Not until I’m done figuring out a few more things. Until then, you’re still pulling too many strings that I’m still identifying, so far. You could easily get rid of me, except you need me.”

“Do I, now?”

“Everybody needs me. And you’ve read my dossier, I hear.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed, and his daemon rose to her feet instantly at a sudden faint rustle nearby. Turning his head, the trickster saw the mortal warrior’s fox emerge from a deep crack between two different chunks of the rock formations around them. She had a small armor-like vest about her ribcage, clearly a part of the armor her human also wore; also a glow from a collar about her neck suggested she had radio communication.

“Oh, clever. You ejected on the way down,” Na’ilah mused.

“And timed my landing to coincide with his crashing into Thor so that you’d not hear me, yes,” the fox agreed. “I’m flattered, incidentally, sweetheart.”

“You wander further from one another than most people of your world,” Loki murmured. “That is not a capability won easily.”

“And you plummeting thousands of feet away fast, out of a moving plane, didn’t seem to actually agonize you the way that sort of distance usually would affect ‘most people’ either,” Tony countered. “Clearly it’s not just witches on Earth who go through it.”

“You’re quite right.” Loki pulled himself to his feet slowly, hissing only a little at another flare of pain from his lower back. “But you are no witch.”

“Well, true. Still bruised?”

“Not only by you. It’s been a very long day.”

“I blame you for that.”

Loki grinned. “Well, you _would._ ”

Tony tried not to smile back at that. Encouraging banter exchanges with villains that his daemon may or may not have some sort of mild crush on _had_ to be a bad idea. Before he could make it worse for himself, Tony called in to the quinjet that he’d found Loki, and provided their coordinates.

He then looked down and realized Na’ilah had taken fox-shape, all red and white and black, which seemed oddly too-cheerful for the trickster’s daemon all of a sudden, given that he hadn’t seen her in any form that hadn’t been a somber black or severe grey-and-white before then. It seemed almost whimsical. She was also much closer to Aysel, as they sniffed each other close enough that their noses nearly touched, which was a bit adorable, but also made his face and neck heat as he felt a prickle of–– _oh hello there something_ , from their too-close proximity.

Tony cleared his throat quickly. “Ace,” he said.

She looked at him, questioning. So did Na’ilah.

“The double-act is creepy, you know.”

The shifty daemon chuckled, and returned to Loki’s side to wait for their ride to arrive and take them where they next needed to be.

 

~~

 

Na’ilah was still in fox-form, resting in her trickster’s arms, when Loki was guided into his impressive mostly-glass cage, neither of them looking like they had a care in the world, even as they were loudly locked in. Nick Fury seemed annoyed and deeply suspicious as a result.

“In case it's unclear, if you try to escape––and if you so much as scratch that glass...” Fury hit a button on the machine, opening metal iris panels directly below it. “It's 30,000ft straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?” Seeing the god still grinning at him, he closed it all up again and concluded by gesturing toward Loki and saying, “Ant...” before turning back to the cage’s controls, and gesturing towards them too as he said, “boot.”

“It's an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me.”

“Built for something a lot stronger than you.”

“Oh, I've _heard_. The mindless beast, makes play he's still a man.”

“Kinda like how you still pretend to have any kind of royal title?”

Loki’s eyes narrowed into a seething glare. “How desperate are you, that you call on such lost creatures to defend you?”

“How _desperate_ am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace and you kill 'cause it's fun. You have made me _very_ desperate. You might not be glad that you did.”

“Ooh.” Loki’s expression turned outright bitchy, then. “It burns you to have come _so close_. To have the Tesseract, to have power–– _unlimited_ power. And for what?” He chuckled softly, full of benevolently cynical doubt. “A warm light for all mankind to share?” His tone then lowered and he growled accusation: “And then to be reminded what _real_ power is.”

“Well, let me know if ‘real power’ wants a magazine or something.” He started to stroll away, then paused. “You get along with Stark well, I hear. You even almost opened up to him, and now it looks like at least some part of you might be something of a fan.” He looked pointedly at the god’s daemon.

“His daemon is more interesting than you,” Na’ilah mocked, lips curled back from her sharp fox-teeth. It had been a long while since she’d worn this shape, and her control over it had gotten a little rusty; the result was genuinely more of a snarl than smile. “Surely you’ve noticed something a bit off, have you not Andreija?” she asked his daemon. “You have two good eyes, still, at least, with which to notice such things.” She grinned challengingly. “There are notes about the matter in his dossier, in fact. Other daemons began reporting little hard-to-describe feelings around her, like her very presence has more weight in the world than the average mortal’s daemon alone ever should. Do you not wonder what might be at the heart of it?”

“Do you actually know, yourself, what it is?” the raven asked, in a voice as cold and clear as Fury’s. She was an old soldier, too, with a few scars of her own.

Loki smiled wide and full of teeth, and the smug look on his daemon’s face was clearly the vulpine equivalent of the same.

After a bit of staring at them further, Nick muttered a curse and walked away with more conviction this time.

 

~~

 

“He really grows on you, doesn’t he?” Bruce Banner mused, at his end of the table with the other “Avengers” who at least (except Natasha) seemed equally uncomfortable being there, and suddenly realizing they were expected to all work together. Bruce’s daemon, a quiet African grey parrot with bright, observant eyes, ruffled her feathers a little and then smoothed them. She usually did that when her human was mentally shaking off some particularly prickly words someone had just aimed at him.

“Loki’s gonna drag this out,” Steve said thoughtfully. He glanced at their primary information source when it came to Loki, and took a moment to quietly be disconcerted by the man’s lack of daemon, then let it go just as deliberately, to dismiss it from the forefront of his mind and focus on what was really important. “So, Thor, what’s his play?”

“He has an army, called the Chitauri,” the god began. “They're not of Asgard nor any other world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract.

“An army,” Steve clarified uneasily. “From outer space.” Izzy, whose shoulder leaned against the soldier’s hip, gave a whine that sounded disgruntled, and maybe a bit disbelieving.

“So he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for,” Bruce pointed out. At his shoulder, Cacia clicked her beak softly in agreement.

Thor’s expression fell. “Selvig?”

“He's an astrophysicist,” Bruce explained.

Gravely, and with a little sorrow, the god responded, “He's a _friend_.”

Natasha cut in, “Loki has them under some kind of spell.” Her daemon growled a little and began to pace around her chair. “Along with one of ours.”

Captain America raised a hand. “I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He's not leading an army from here.”

“I don't think we should be focusing on Loki,” the biochemist advised frankly. “That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him.”

“Have a care how you speak! Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard and he is my brother,” Thor insisted.

The red-haired assassin pointed out, “He killed eighty people in two days.”

The Thunderer looked uncomfortable for a moment. “He's adopted.”

“I think it’s about the mechanics. What about the Iridium? What’s he need all that Iridium for?” Bruce started to ask.

Which was when Tony strode into the room, just in time to overhear and answer quickly, interrupting himself mid-sentence to say, “It’s a stabilizing agent,” then turn right back to Coulson and pick up where he’d left off, muttering, “Just take a weekend, I’ll fly out there to Portland. We’ll have lunch.” He waved, briefly, as Coulson excused himself, and continued approaching the rest of Fury’s top-secret almost-all-boys band. Really, he’d have expected a bit better of Fury, since the man worked with the frighteningly competent Maria Hill as his second in command, but he’d let Pepper chew Nick out on that front. She knew just the right people to call him about, too. Stark Industries got all sorts of... consultation requests, these days. Some weren’t exactly all economics.

“It means that the portal won’t collapse in on itself like it did with S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Tony then elaborated. He paused to look at Thor pointedly for a second. “Hey, no hard feelings, Point Break. You’ve got a mean swing.” He rapped one rippling thunder-god bicep and tried not to be disconcerted by how much it felt like coils of steel cables, humming with tension under skin like living marble. “It also means that the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants,” he continued, moving towards the display screens which... surely this couldn’t be the array they were forcing a man with only one eye to cope with. Maybe he was missing something, voice-activated maybe? “Raise the mizzenmast. Jib the topsails,” he tried. He was met only with a few blank looks from the nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

“Tony,” Natasha said, her voice warning.

It was only then that Thor noticed everyone was staring at Tony with a mixture of suspicion as well as irritation, and in one or two cases some of the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel less familiar with Stark’s history looked on with genuine fear. It then took him a few moments to deduce quite why, and it resulted in him doing a double-take.

“That man is playing Galaga! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did,” Tony loudly pointed out, jabbing a finger toward a young man halfway across the room.

“ _Tony Stark_ ,” Natasha snapped.

The inventor spun on his heel to shoot her an innocently inquiring look. He lowered the hand he’d been holding over his eye, imagining Fury trying to use this interface and scowling a bit as a result. He held up his other hand towards Natasha. “How does Fury even see these?”

“He _turns_ ,” she said flatly.

“Sounds exhausting,” Tony muttered.

“I think Natasha’s been trying to get your attention in order to ask where your daemon is?” Hill then asked, deadpan. The red wolf at her side nodded, sharply, his brow deeply furrowed with angry confusion.

“Oh, she’s around. Don’t worry about her; she’s pretty self-sufficient.”

“Stark, even personnel with the sort of training necessary to allow them such distance from their daemons are advised to keep close to them when upon any S.H.I.E.L.D. base, or risk being treated as a security risk,” Hill said sharply. “Well, unless they’re one of our witches, but that’s neither here nor there, since _you_ are neither a witch nor a witch’s close kin.”

“You people train in that regularly?” Steve asked, sounding more startled than outright scandalized, but still a little scandalized nevertheless. That sort of thing had been strictly religious/cultural (such as in the case of surviving covens of witches worldwide, however slowly their populations still were to recover since World War II and certain cultural fallout in many more conservative or authoritarian nations in the decades after) or otherwise considered strictly taboo and even morally reprehensible.

“It’s necessary for many field agents, and at times, can be the only way to guarantee our daemons’ safety and our own lives: by allowing them enough distance from us, without pain, to escape being captured if we’re compromised,” Natasha explained succinctly.

Steve and Bruce both stared at her.

“You?” Bruce asked calmly.

She nodded, and reached down to stroke between her daemon’s ears when the lynx moved to pull away from her at the painful memory, a bit uncomfortably. Zada relaxed only slowly, and reluctantly, but kept leaning into her human’s touch once caught under it.

“But _you_...” Steve started, his brow furrowed in confusion as he looked back at Stark, who smiled unkindly. “That still doesn’t explain.”

“Mine wasn’t voluntary,” was all Tony said, with his voice devoid of inflection, for once, making the words all the drier and more clinically distant.

“Oh, my god, I’m sorry, I-”

The inventor waved it off. “Just drop it.”

“Gladly,” Steve murmured, mostly to himself.

“So where’s your daemon, Stark?” Hill inquired.

“Honestly, she’s helping JARVIS upgrade some of her own interfaces in the armor, for when she’s flying with me. You can check the live feed from the security cameras down there, if you like, but it’s a fox sitting around talking to an AI, so try not to be too disturbed.” He rolled his eyes at them. “Can we move on?”

“Will he need any other equally rare raw materials, along with the Iridium?” Natasha asked, sounding resigned to getting a move on beyond this deliberate little Stark _faux pas_ , but very clearly annoyed with him about it.

“Not really, the rest of the raw materials are common enough that Agent Barton’s connections and capabilities alone will make easy for him to acquire,” the inventor explained. “The last major thing he’s gonna need is a power source, though. Loki could probably hijack one pretty easy, though.”

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” Hill inquired.

“Last night,” Tony sassed. “The packet. Selvig's notes, the extraction theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”

Natasha seemed to be frowning a bit more than before, this time at Tony’s careless assumption that Loki would escape sooner rather than later, and how uncomfortably resigned all of them clearly were to the idea already. Well-merited as it was, that just couldn’t be a very auspicious sign, and it set her a little on-edge.

“Does Loki need any particular _kind_ of power source?” asked Steve.

“He'd have to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier,” Bruce said.

Tony immediately turned toward him with a little grin and riposted, “Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect.”

“Well, if he could do that,” the biochemist extrapolated, “then he could achieve heavy ion fusion at almost any reactor on the planet.”

“Finally,” the inventor approved warmly, strolling over and offering a handshake to Dr. Banner, “someone who speaks English.”

“Is that what just happened here?” Steve deadpanned.

“It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner,” Tony greeted. “Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a _huge_ fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

The fellow scientist looked more amused than disconcerted, but just barely. “Uh... Thanks.”

“Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube,” Fury corrected. “I was hoping you might join him, Stark.”

“Let's start with that stick of his,” Steve suggested. “It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon.”

“I don't know about that, but it _is_ powered by the cube,” the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director said. “And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.”

Thor’s brow furrowed. “Monkeys? I do not understand.”

“I do!” Steve said quickly. He tried to ignore the way Stark’s eyes rolled so exaggeratedly it looked like he might sprain something. “I understood that reference.”

The inventor gestured toward the door and inquired, “Shall we play, doctor?”

“Persuasive,” Bruce conceded, and followed him out.

 

~~

 

Illusions which can be mistaken for someone’s daemon are, whether or not any mage might admit it, almost impossible to get away with in front of someone who also has one of their own. Races born with daemons, or people who gain daemons by means of mystic rites and mastery thereof, can tell without any conscious thought, whether an animal in front of them is, or is not a daemon, even where the most refined magic spells and scientific tools might be unable to make the same conclusion without resorting to touch––well, except for some very specific tools and spells related to Dust, most of which could have side-effects, or were considered taboo on a galactic level for historically being associated with cultures that misused the technology, producing only horrors: children with bonds cut from their daemons, never to mature, usually prone to losing their minds to self-destructive behaviors, or becoming catatonic, for the rest of their never-very-long lives.

The key to successfully getting away with having an illusion mistaken for the presence of one’s daemon is the most powerful tool any magic-user can incorporate into their skill-set: misdirection, and a very specific knowledge of when, and by what means, one is being observed.

Upon application of a little prudent magic, Loki’s daemon thus escaped the cage unnoticed with perfect ease. By her nature as a mage’s daemon of considerable age, she had a little magic of her own from the nature of the blood and sacrifice through which she had been summoned, as well as subsequent centuries of experience, and could easily walk unnoticed amongst such magic-numb people as human mortals. In his cage, observed only by cameras, Loki maintained the illusion that his daemon had slipped under his coat again, in the form of a cobra, and concealed herself there, out of sight save for the shape of her under the fabric, one loose coil of her body about Loki’s neck. Just enough that prudent, very human eyes watching his security feeds would consider her to still be in sight.

In truth, Na’ilah wandered.

Few other daemons were sensitive enough to detect any trace of her, scent or otherwise. She passed easily through the helicarrier, following a scent trail into one of the cargo units. She could hear two voices that, once she shifted into a smaller feline form with taller and keener ears, she identified as digital; although one was clearly designed to sound like a particular little fox. Na’ilah’s “tame” cat-shape was analogous in shape to, but much bigger than (being just taller at the shoulder than an American bobcat) most domesticated, short-haired black cats of Earth; although not very unusually large by Asgardian standards, given that Freyja was known to keep two felines both large enough, and cooperative enough, to pull her chariot about at considerable speeds. The only major differences from an earthly domestic cat she had, aside from her size, were broader paws and oversized tufted ears more like a caracal.

Not that anyone could see the cat-shaped mage’s-daemon now, still concealed as she was. Na’ilah crept just close enough to peer around a corner and catch sight of a large, open shipping container, containing a familiar suit of red-and-gold armor, amongst other things. One of the other things appeared to be an AI interface, a work-table, and an automated repair/augmentation unit that the fox-hologram was giving orders to, requesting some minor tweaks, or pointing out areas that she had noticed needed adjustment/tweaking during the last flight.

It was a perfectly choreographed work of art.

As the daemon of a fine mage herself, Na’ilah had to admire it. “Oh bra _vo_.”

“I’d wondered when you’d start to wander,” said a less-digitized version of the fox’s voice, from far too close behind her.

The shiftier daemon turned her head toward it, large ears pivoting to get a fix on the precise location of where the sound came from. She could see nothing, but with an effort, could hear the very faintest electric hum about one meter away from her. Then it took a small step closer. “Stealth technology?”

“Yes. You give off a very faint energy signature, yourself.”

Na’ilah hummed, amused and curious, walking a small circle around the fox, aware of something she couldn’t see allowing the mortal’s daemon to apparently keep a lock on her, head turning to keep her in ‘sight’ despite the both of them maintaining their respective forms of cloaking. “How ridiculous, two invisible persons standing around out of even each other’s sight, yet chatting. I am curious, however; why are _you_ hiding?”

“I was seeing what else they have around here, evacuated from the base you blew up a short while back.”

“And what have you found?”

“...Not exactly ‘a warm light for all mankind to share’ let’s say.”

Na’ilah chuckled softly. “You’re not surprised.”

“No. We knew to expect it as soon as we found out when Howard Stark had found the tesseract for them, and how long they kept us in the dark about it,” the fox agreed. “We’re used to keeping shmucks like these in check, these days, though. Or, at least, we’re getting a lot of practice. For a while now, of given potential threats or corners from which we expect betrayal, S.H.I.E.L.D. has been given a little leeway by us because they’re the devil we know, and the devil we can get the secrets of more easily than most others, with enough digging.”

“For their more modern plans, machinations and resources, perhaps,” Na’ilah purred. “Ah, but they’ve been at this for _ages_ , and history, and historical narratives, are always where the very most bodies are buried under the most questionable circumstances. It is the nature of things, throughout the whole of the galaxy, amongst most races capable of even the smallest degrees of selfishness.”

The fox went quiet, at that, seeming to give it consideration.

“There’s an awful lot of graves to dig up, in an organization like S.H.I.E.L.D., darling. You might even now know the modern animals and structures of theirs better than they themselves do, but until your claws can reach out beyond their digital-era systems and into their vaults, their endless collections of old papers too full of dangerous international secrets too sensitive to digitize, then you cannot say that you know even begin to truly know even most of their devilishness, let alone to what lengths and depths it goes. You are caught in a war of strangers, little fox.”

“You aren’t here to win. You’re running. What from?” Aysel asked sharply. “Or from whom, perhaps? And to where?”

It was Na’ilah’s turn to stand very still, and give far greater consideration to her words. “Running and winning might not be mutually exclusive. It depends upon which game you’re watching.”

“Correction, then: you’re not here to _conquer this world_. You’re too perceptive for that crap. You don’t need to know even as much about humanity’s history as _you_ clearly do, to know that a violent takeover _won’t work_ , here. Not unless you either plan to exterminate all of your newly-acquired subjects right off the bat and lord over an empty world––not likely, and not even a little practical by the standards of the egomaniacally insane––or unless you can turn off the most human parts of every brain on this planet.” Again, she stepped a little closer. “We all know you don’t have enough power for _that_ sort of trick, even with that scepter of yours. Humanity hates outsiders more than its various factions hate each other, and can change our whole ideologies when under sufficient threats; you and any army you brought with you would have to waste centuries trying to wipe out all resistance. So... you gonna answer my questions, or keep playing coy with me, sweetheart?”

A low growl came from the other daemon, now.

Aysel continued regardless: “That spear of yours is communicating with something far, far away in a language we can’t begin to decipher, not in the least because of the massive volumes of data contained in them, and the speed at which they’re being broadcast. It speeds up in proximity to conscious minds if they’re human, but seems not to register daemons. Who is it feeding information to?”

The fox wasn’t actually expecting to find herself pinned to the floor with teeth around her throat. Things had seemed to be going so _well_.

 

~~

 

“The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig’s reports for the tesseract, but it’s gonna take weeks to process,” Bruce murmured, as he scanned the scepter and frowned over the data.

“If we bypass their mainframe, and direct route to the homerouter cluster, we can clock this in at around 600 teraflops,” the engineer responded casually.

With a chuckle, the biochemist remarked, “And all _I_ brought was a toothbrush.”

Tony grinned brightly. “You know, you should come by Stark tower sometime. Top floors are all R&D. You’d love it; it’s candy-land.”

“Thanks, but, last time I was in New York I accidentally––broke... Harlem,” Bruce admitted, self-deprecating and reluctant.

“Well, I promise a stress-free environment,” the inventor assured. “No tension, no surprises.” He may have casually, albeit sharply, prodded Bruce’s side with something pointy.

“Ow!”

Tony leaned in, examined closely, curious and blasé in his fearlessness. “Nothin’?”

“Hey!” called a passing Steve Rogers.

Tony tried to ignore him.

“What’re you, nuts?”

Then his sass got the better of him. “Jury’s out.” He turned back to Bruce, “You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag o’ weed?” He relaxed almost unnoticeably as soon as Bruce chuckled, laughing it off with an odd sort of relief, once he realized it really was just scientific curiosity, rather than pity or suspicion.

“Is _everything_ a joke to you?” the soldier protested. His daemon growled a little.

“Funny things are,” Tony shot back. He nodded acknowledgement when Cacia clicked her beak disapprovingly at the golden retriever daemon, who cocked his head, looking bemused at her in response. “Thank you.”

“Threatening the lives of everyone on this ship isn’t funny,” Steve insisted, then hesitated. “No offense, Doc.”

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t’ve come aboard if I couldn’t handle, uh, _pointy things_.”

“You’re tip-toeing, big man. You need to strut,” Stark mused.

“And you need to focus on the problems, Mr. Stark,” said the super-soldier.

“You think I’m not?” Stark challenged. “Why’d Fury call us in, why now, and not before? What isn’t he telling us?” He gestured vaguely. “I can’t do the equation, unless I have all of the variables.”

“You think Fury’s hiding something?”

“He’s a spy. Captain, he’s _the spy_. His secrets have secrets.” He tossed a few blueberries into his mouth. “It’s buggin’ him too,” He gestured toward Banner, “innit?”

“Uhh,” Bruce said, sitting very still suddenly. Cacia, on his shoulder, tucked her head under one of her wings and turned a bit away from them. “I just––wanna finish my work here, and, uh...”

“Doctor?” Steve asked, a bit less sharply, genuinely needing confirmation.

The biochemist sighed, and so did his daemon, lifting her head out from under her wing, bit still hanging it low slightly, like she was sulky about it. “‘A warm light for all mankind’: Loki’s jab at Fury about the cube.”

“I heard it,” the soldier agreed, but seemed suddenly like he wasn’t sure he’d caught that reference in its entirety. His daemon looked to Stark at the same time Bruce did, pointing at the inventor.

“I think that was meant for you,” Bruce said, smiling a little when Tony turned his back on the star-spangled soldier and held out his blueberries as offered reward, which his fellow scientist accepted a few of. “Even if Barton didn’t tell Loki about the Tower, it’s still been all over the news.”

“Stark Tower?” Steve asked. “That big ugly-” He paused when his daemon dropped a paw heavily over one of his boots, and caught Stark shooting him a look. “-uh, building... in New York?”

“It’s powered by an arc reactor: a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for, what, a year?”

Tony waved it off. “That’s just a prototype.” Seeing the soldier shooting them further questioning looks, he then added, “I’m kinda the only name in clean energy right now. That’s what he’s gettin’ at.”

“So,” Bruce continued, “why didn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. bring him in on the tesseract project? And what are they doing getting in the energy business in the first place?”

“I should probably look into that once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secure files,” Tony announced, as he sauntered across the room to pick up his phone, from which he was monitoring that progress.

That seemed to almost short-circuit Steve for a second. “I’m sorry, did you say-”

“JARVIS has been running it since I hit the bridge. In about two hours, I’ll know every dirty secret S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever tried to hide. Blueberry?” he offered.

“And yet you’re confused about why they didn’t want you involved,” Steve remarked coolly.

“An ‘intelligence’ organization that _fears_ intelligence? Historically, not awesome.”

“I think Loki’s trying to wind us up,” Steve said. “This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don’t stay focused, he’ll succeed. We have orders, and they’re not actually offensive enough to merit ignoring them more than following them, so far.”

Picking up a few more blueberries, Tony shrugged. “Following isn’t really my style.” He then dropped them into his mouth.

“And you’re all about style, aren’t you?”

“Of the two of us, which one is A) wearing a spangly outfit, and B) not of use? Seriously, have you never heard of multitasking? Was it not invented yet?”

“Seriously?” Steve deadpanned. “Are you seriously asking me that?”

“The same question, and variations of the same like ‘telling’ instead of ‘asking’, have been going through my head every time we talk, so far, you and I, Capsicle. I know you knew my dad back in the war, but dude, I’ve technically lived longer than you, if you subtract freezer-time. You don’t get seniority privileges just because your birthdate suggests you should, by rights, be wrinkly.”

The super-soldier frowned at that, but looked uncomfortably introspective as he did so. “I see. Uhm. Sorry, I...”

Tony nodded to him. “Fresh start, then?” He proffered the blueberries again.

Taking one, Steve nodded back. “Thanks.”

“Steve,” Bruce said, more soothingly, more relieved than he wanted to admit that the posturing seemed to be on pause for now. “Can you really tell me this doesn’t smell a little funky, to you?”

After a brief hesitation, the soldier sighed, “It does, yeah. See you both after you find the cube, then. I’ll check out a few things, myself, too,” and strode out. His daemon gave what sounded like a sigh of exasperation suspiciously along the lines of a wordless “here we go again” shortly before jumping up and following him at a trot.

Tony watched them go and clicked his tongue. “By hand? Like a barbarian? Is that seriously the guy my dad could never shut up about?”

Bruce blinked at him.

“Maybe they should’ve kept him on ice...”

“He’s just stressed out, and out of his depth, a bit. You’re right, about his age.”

“Yeah, try not to remind me. He looks practically baby-faced.” He would never admit aloud to feeling self-consciously more middle-aged whenever the super-soldier loomed nearby, either bathing them in the golden light of his agelessness, or overshadowing them with his ridiculous dorito-like shoulder-to-waist ratio. Tony knew far, far too many women, and men, who would consider it a crime against humanity, that the Captain wasn’t more promiscuous and a lot less earnestly moral. The inventor resisted the temptation to try and aim them at the Captain in order to loosen him up; it wouldn’t help him fix the unsteady nature of conversations with the guy. Probably.

Bruce interrupted his musings: “Can I ask you something unrelated to all of this?”

“Yeah, sure. What?” The inventor glanced at him curiously.

“You know it’s really unnerving to be around you when she’s nowhere in sight, right?” Bruce asked, rubbing the back of his neck a bit sheepishly. “You’re really not uncomfortable with it at all?”

“Nah. I’m fine,” Tony said. “I did actually have her pull initial S.H.I.E.L.D. scans from some of the tools they aren’t sharing with us yet, that they used on it before letting us take a crack at it. She came across some weird forms of energy readings, nothing like we’ve ever run into before.”

“So... she wasn’t really doing repairs?”

“Video footage, rather than direct line-of-sight, makes it possible for her to use a live-model-decoy, as long as there are no human witnesses around. They still haven’t worked out what it is about that recognition factor in humans, after all,” Tony said casually. “She’s around, but as long as she doesn’t get in any-” he abruptly lost his footing, tripped, and hit the ground hard. He barely managed to catch himself, and his face had drained of color all at once.

“You alright?” Bruce said, standing quickly.

He lied almost-convincingly, “Yeah... uh. Just tripped.” Tony raised his phone, which he’d barely managed not land on, closer to his face and tapped a few quick commands, pivoting himself to lie back on the ground, like this was just one more billionaire eccentricity thing. “Just gonna, uh, check on her real quick.”

“Something up with Aysel?” Cacia asked suddenly.

Tony sat up and stared, at that. He hand’t heard the parrot say a word before then. Usually, when his daemon ignored people, she sort of deliberately forgot their names, unless he made a point of asking her not to, which was rare, and he did frequently forget that most other daemons weren’t quite so aloof. He was also hadn’t realized Bruce’s daemon already knew Aysel’s name; although, in retrospect, it was probably in the intro packet S.H.I.E.L.D. had given them.

Tony realized he still hadn’t answered. “Uh. Yeah, maybe.” He raised the phone to his ear. “JARVIS, why am I not getting through?”

“ _She seems to have the situation under control so far, sir, but it is... delicate_.”

“I got _that_ impression based on the sudden adrenaline spike alone, but what’s the neck thing? It’s increasingly distracting.” It was, in fact, warm and tingly and somewhere between pain and... very much _not pain_ in an intimate sort of manner––not quite sexual, but without the panic involved, it could probably become so easily––that Tony was increasingly uncomfortable with. He might, in fact, be starting to freak out, because _what the hell_ , which fed back into his bond with his daemon, making her also suddenly more afraid, which at least caused the other feeling to diminish a little.

“Neck?” Bruce asked.

Apparently, whatever the answer was caused most of the color to drain from Tony’s face, but his expression quickly became one of resignation. “Okay, I see why you didn’t want to interrupt.” He glanced over at the now-deeply-concerned biochemist and shrugged helplessly. “Where are they?” He took a deep breath, and let it out. “I assume you already have her targeted? Good. Standby, then.” He took a deep breath, and let it out. Putting a hand over the receiver, he said, “She’s got it. She’s just stuck somewhere but interrupting will only get her in deeper trouble, because of where she is,” he half-lied. He wasn’t entirely sure why he didn’t want to mention Loki’s daemon being involved. It seemed safer, to omit it, rather than have to explain why exactly his daemon seemed to sort of _like_ her, however inexplicably. “Nothing to do but wait it out.”

“Ah,” Bruce said. “So you need to be distracted, while you wait, it sounds like?”

Tony nodded, smiling a bit wider sadly. “Yeah. Yeah, good idea. Those scans, let’s pull them up again.” He dragged himself to his feet and strode back over toward the scepter, pulling up a stool to sit down on. His knees still felt week, from the emotional and physical stress he could feel coming across the bond. He was grateful when Bruce started a barrage of commentary, as soon as he pulled up the information Aysel had already collected for them on one of his tablets. While the other scientist pored over it, Tony tapped a few commands into his phone, and put in one earbud, enough to hear the conversation his daemon was having.

It took him a second to understand actual words through the more animalistic snarls, at first, until he adjusted a bit and realized the snarling _was_ actual words. His daemon was just swearing a blue streak in multiple languages again.

 

~~

 

“-is really unnecessary!” the fox accused, after she finally finished up swearing, upon finding herself unable to even struggle. A loud beep followed.

Na’ilah growled warningly at it.

“Consider for a moment exactly how likely it is that Tony Stark is on the other end of this helicarrier, making a scene now, because of exactly what you’re doing. _Not very inconspicuous_. He’s being updated on my status,” Aysel snarled back. “I recommend strongly that you let go.”

The feline form the mage’s daemon occupied was barely larger than a bobcat, but very strong, with long hind-limbs and large forepaws, one of which settled, claws out, over the very base of the little fox’s throat before Na’ilah raised her head enough to free her mouth for speech, while still leaving a threat in place and keeping the other daemon pinned down. “If he’s aware of the threat you are currently under, he knows to make no sudden moves my way.”

The fox swallowed tightly. “You don’t want to hurt me. He and I are too useful to a few key plans of yours. It’d ruin the _show_ , being rid of us early.”

“Much better: civil discourse at last, rather than empty threats.”

“Your idea of civil discourse is vastly different from mine, then.”

“To be fair, I’ve lived most of my life around the characters that peoples of earth known as vikings once worshipped as gods.”

That earned a snort of amusement despite Aysel’s efforts to contain it. “You’re not allowed to be that funny when you’ve got claws at my throat.”

“Then perhaps it’s time you listen for a while, rather wasting your energies on struggling, and trying to unsettle me.”

The fox huffed. “Then say something worth listening to, aside from wisecracks.”

“My trickster is being watched, and I cannot protect him,” Na’ilah said. Feeling the daemon beneath her paw grow very still, at that, and quiet, she then continued, “He’s left most of his mind with me, because his captors could not capture or contain the likes of me. I am that most dangerous of mage’s daemons: I am fully aware of all that I am made of, and can still re-shape it at will to an extent, and furthermore I have blood of my own, and magic flowing through it.” She tilted her head a little, and made an adjustment to her own cloaking spells, just to allow the fox below her visibility through them. She then reached out and shared her own concealment, and in the process quietly snapped offline the cloaking mechanisms the fox otherwise wore, rendering Aysel visible only to her. “You are as hidden as I. Panic not.”

The fox swallowed thickly. Having earlier suspicions that the renegade god in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody might be running from someone still worse, and still scarier, she decided, was nothing compared to how horrifying it was to hear confirmation of it in such painfully exacting terms. “So what’s he actually still know?”

“He knows all that he is allowed to know, in order to behave in a manner to convince our audience. He and I wrote the whole play beforehand. I am director, while he is... only a little less himself, the lead performer.”

“They’re watching via the scepter.”

Na’ilah nodded. “But not me. They could never... _keep track_ of me.”

“You have a way to wake him up, though, whenever.”

“He is not asleep. He remains as much himself as is possible, but with limited access to his own knowledge and memories. His actions, and _reactions_ , to the people of Earth, still hinge upon his own decision-making.”

“Except where you steer him, since you remember what he currently isn’t allowed to?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think much of civilian casualties, then?”

“The more care taken by Loki or myself to protect individual mortals for no apparent logical reason related to our mission, the more likely are any humans within our reach to become hostages of the scepter. Those watching him are more than capable of forcing him to kill, and if they ever chose to do so, it will be far worse then than it has so far been. That scepter alone has power enough to level a city, if used properly, all at once, or to take over an entire nation or two worth of mind’s, if used more slowly and patiently, and then it’s simply a longer game of conquest.”

“You’re both taking the path of least resistance,” Aysel muttered, almost disappointed. “And slightly lazy forms of expediency.”

“It is called theater, darling, and you know all about it too, do you not?”

The smaller daemon cleared her throat quietly. “Like recognizes like,” she said, in a nice, even and mostly-unaffected tone.

“Would you prefer we really give it our _all_ , to take over your world? I would be content to have my trickster himself again elsewhere, but if you’re so _desperate_ for a charming godly despot, I suppose I could _encourage_ him a little more.”

“No thanks,” the fox assured quickly.

“I thought so. How long has your human been listening in?”

“Oh, shortly before ‘civil discourse’ came up, probably.”

“Hmm.” She tilted her head. “How did you discern the nature of the creature we’re escaping?”

“Why won’t you name who it is?”

“Names have power, and I am avoiding their attention as much as possible, so long as my mage’s mind has a hook lodged in it from outside. I do not take my current freedom for granted anymore than you do, rest assured. Now _your_ answer, if you please, Aysel dear.”

The fox hesitated, then sighed. “Look, just... Okay, so Loki looks to me like he’s been dragged through hell, and it’s familiar, _alright?!_ ” she snapped. “I remember how Tony and I _both_ looked, after we made it back from a certain desert where a cell of terrorists took us apart in all sorts of ugly ways to make use of us, all because a man we looked up to as we couldn’t look up to Tony’s father, for most of our lives, decided it was time for us to die. All that, in turn, was just so that _h_ e could make _more money_ off _everything Tony and I ever built_. Do you need to know more than that? About how he looked then about like how your trickster god looks now, whenever he reaches for you?” Her voice choked off slightly under the pressure of sharp claws.

“Stop.”

“No,” Aysel growled, “I won’t, because you look like you barely survived it too. And, like I said, you both smell a lot like blood and terror, even now. His armor, your fur, it clings to you. Add the smell of burning gas, overheated metal, and more _human_ blood, and I’ve got nightmares myself that smell about the same.” She fell quiet abruptly at the feel of the claws at her throat pressing a bit harder into her skin, still not quite piercing it, but closer. “I could see what you’re doing because we did the same damn thing, but we didn’t bring down nearly so many _innocent_ people in the process.”

“No, you got all those out of the way before that, in your initial ignorance.”

“You’re not ignorant of much, and I don’t know how you’re doing this, but I don’t think it’s what you’d prefer. I think it’s all you’ve got, and you have too much pride to dare admit what it’s cost you,” the fox riposted.

Na’ilah was breathing a bit more raggedly, and might have been shaking. “Damn you,” she growled, and vanished.

Aysel felt her cloaking tech snap back into action as soon as the ozone-smelling magic that had been smothering both of them abruptly cleared. She may have then emitted a very confused whine.

“Ace?” Tony asked in her ear, very softly, over her communicator.

“JARVIS, check the video feed from cameras in Loki’s cell.”

“There is some form of interference, with the camera feed, which started precisely when Na’ilah fled,” the AI assured.

“Shit,” the inventor swore.

“It’s stopped now,” JARVIS said.

“What’s he doing?” Aysel demanded.

“It... seems he is kneeling in the middle of his cell now. He was not before. Just under a minute of footage was lost or damaged. S.H.I.E.L.D. systems are even now trying to find the cause for it, but all evidence available so far is... Well, apparently, they haven’t found any,” said the AI.

“I hope magic isn’t always like that,” Tony groaned.

“And Na’ilah?” the fox asked.

“She would be the reason for his kneeling there; however, she appears whole, and is in good hands.”

“Your status, Ace?” Tony demanded suddenly.

“Shaken, but not stirred.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“I can’t help the way we were raised,” she accused.

“You two know the drill, for shutting off the hologram seamlessly,” Tony said. “Do that. Then you, Ace, get back here.”

“Yes,” Aysel sighed. “I’ll be there. Fast as I can, I promise.”

“Good.” The inventor’s relief was clear. “Don’t _ever_ do that again.”

“I didn’t think she’d-”

“ _Ace_.”

“Tell you what, I’ll be more careful if you will.”

Tony sighed. “C’mon, don’t do _that_.”

“Practice what you preach, my little human,” she cooed. “I’m on my way.”

His reluctant chuckle was the last thing she heard before going on radio silence, in order to pull the usual smoke-and-mirrors trick against S.H.I.E.L.D. security. She’d only done this two or three times before, but felt she was really getting the hang of it.

 

~~

 

Tony set down his phone and rubbed both hands over his face.

Bruce gave him a minute or so. “Bad?”

The inventor groaned. He considered being frank with Bruce. He wanted to, but with the scepter in the room, and given that apparently the scepter was somehow feeding information back to whoever had sent Loki to steal the tesseract for them, made him disinclined to say a word about it. “She’s safe. She’s out.”

“Good. So what’s the catch?”

Tony shot him a miserable look. “I dunno yet. Overheard... something.”

“Something not a good idea to interrupt?”

The inventor nodded. “Not sure how safe it is to discuss it here.” He eyed the security cameras––those meant to be visible, and the rest too, just to remind S.H.I.E.L.D. that he knew what was up. Maybe not the best idea to remind them, considering his earlier pratfall and subsequent flailing, but he was Tony Stark. Let them think maybe some of his blueberries were secretly whiskey-filled or something. Excuses for stuff like that, in comparison, was easy.

“I thought you were already hacking them. Why not, uh...”

“Still working on it. Also, I’m trying to maintain a low profile for JARVIS. They still dunno too much about him.”

“Will you actually tell us later?” Cacia asked.

Bruce looked only a little chagrinned by her forthright query.

Tony fixed on that for a second, puzzled by it. He knew Daemons speaking directly to other people were still considered inappropriate in some parts of the world. It depended how privately people considered communications with their daemons to be, in some cultures more than others.

The western world itself tended to be conflicted about the subject, at best, and erred on the side of Victorian by most media standards, but that had started changing along with a number of other things in the 70’s. The effects of LSD on people and their daemons, as well as some discoveries in the world of psychology, had set them in motion and it was no longer a scandal for someone’s daemon to comment, or even answer on their human’s behalf casually; although in their own private lives, in more religiously conservative places, it would still garner a certain stigma.

Tony recalled that the doctor before him, not only a genius biochemist but also qualified as a general practitioner, had been in India, before S.H.I.E.L.D. had called him in. In India, as with many cultures further eastward still, tended to be less prudish about the behavior of their daemons. He supposed readjusting to the U.S. and how much less communicative other daemons and humans were with strangers, in the Americas, must make Bruce wary of accidentally embarrassing people.

Tony smiled crookedly and shrugged it off. “I will. Dunno when it’ll be, but I will.”

“Is it about Loki?”

“What isn’t, around here, right now?”

“You jealous of his being the center of attention?” Bruce suggested with a deceptively kind smile.

“Was that a burn you just inflicted, Dr. Banner?”

“Do you deny it?”

“Hell no. Be funny more often, you’re great at it.”

“We’ll see,” Bruce murmured. “So it is then?”

Tony nodded. “And that.” He pointed at the scepter.

“It does seem to be communicating with somewhere far, far away. And getting some stuff back,” Bruce muttered. “Weird and unreadable as whatever it’s transmitting is, we can’t deny it’s sending and receiving _something_.” He frowned. “Do you think maybe Loki’s not just putting people under mind control, but actually spreading something he’s also afflicted with?”

“Everyone he touched with that thing underwent the same observable physical changes: they relaxed like they were content with the world and ready to follow orders, also their eyes went blue-black for a bit and then cleared and became iridescent blue, slightly glowing. Loki’s eyes are green. They also don’t _glow_ , and his daemon’s eyes are black-and-yellow, but footage Fury sent me when they first dragged me along for this ride showed the daemons of people affected by the scepter also saw similar physical changes. Their eyes didn’t glow as strongly, but did change to a uniform blue shade, across the whole eye.” He gestured toward his own face, widening one eye illustratively as his finger pointed at each corner of it. “I don’t think he’s under as much control, if any, along the same lines as the people he’s ‘converted’ around here, lately.”

“He’s... called a god of lies down on Earth over two thousand years after his folks stopped dropping in around. Even from what little Thor has told us, it’s sort of clear the guy _still_ has that reputation, even with his own foster-brother or whatever,” Bruce muttered. “Why wouldn’t whoever this theoretical other party is, who is giving him the army Thor told us about, not put him fully under control?”

“Maybe they couldn’t.”

“Think he included it in the terms of the deal or something?”

“I don’t think he was exactly in a position to dictate the terms,” Tony mused. “Did you see the footage of when he first showed up?”

The biochemist shook his head.

Tony pulled it up on a nearby screen, then sat back on his own stool and stared into space while Bruce took it in. When he’d watched it himself the night before, the inventor had been shaken by it, and he’d had trouble working out why until Aysel pointed something in it out to him.

 

_“They just caught him.”_

_“Hmm?”_

_“Look at how he’s moving,” she muttered. “Rewind it about thirty seconds, then rewatch. You looked away, don’t think I didn’t notice.”_

_Tony rewound it, and watched a bit more closely. He watched, this time, as after the confrontation with Fury, as he’d been walking away, Loki stumbled, clutching at his back––_ in the same place he would later, after not only had Tony flung him down in such a way that the injured spot got intimately familiar with some concrete stairs, but also after Thor had caused it to crash-into-and-drag-along some rocky surfaces, clutch with a pained look while being herded back into the quinjet _––and letting his new minions help him re-steady himself and keep walking._

_“So he didn’t land so easy as he made it look?”_

_“He landed in a forward crouch, down on one knee. That’s not the position of someone who got their lower-back injuries in transit,” Aysel remarked. “He was hurt before he left, and was able to cope with the pain until just then. I’ll even bet that nobody in that room of people he fought landed any damage there. Right JARVIS?”_

_After quickly processing the frames of the rest of the video, the AI confirmed, “Yes, actually.” He sounded surprised. “None did.”_

_The fox only looked up at her human. “He’s running.”_

_“Or he got in a fight sometime before making the trip here, completely unrelated.”_

_She frowned at him. “Alright, you dumb human, rewind all of it, watch it again, and look closer at his daemon, alright?”_

_Reluctantly, but also unwilling to argue with his daemon once she resorted to almost-Pepper-like curtness, Tony did so._

_He was making a face by the end, as Na’ilah went after her trickster god, and he stumbled, and she stuck right to him, and he gripped her hard––surely that must’ve hurt? but it seemed to sooth them both, after a few moments––by the scruff at the back of her neck. The god and his daemon both looked almost-formidable again just before the tape ran out._

 

Tony snapped out of his reverie when his daemon ran into the room and took a flying leap at him, forcing him to both brace one of his feet on the floor to keep the stool he was on from tipping much, and catch her in his arms, in order to maintain his own balance and not let her fall catastrophically. He did think that her degree of trust really was ridiculous, sometimes. She scrabbled up his chest to wrap around his neck tightly, all but burrowing into him until he settled both hands over her, one at her shoulders, and the other supporting her hind legs and even-bushier-than-usual tail. All of her fur seemed to be standing on end.

The biochemist and his parrot glanced their way, then politely refocused on the last thirty seconds of S.H.I.E.L.D. video footage.

Aysel emitted one ragged sigh and then a grumpy-sounding whine.

“You okay?” Tony asked softly.

The whine became a low, even grumpier rumbling.

The inventor scratched between her flattened-back ears until she relaxed a little.

“Well crap,” Bruce sighed, at the end of the clip.

“Hm?”

He glanced at the scepter. “Let’s get coffee.”

“Let’s find Natasha first, then get coffee.”

“Uh...”

“Look, I heard they had her bring you in, as herself. Look, she’s not good at first impressions without a false identity and full cover-story, but she more than makes up for it with a bit of time and... Well, I trust her a lot more than I do the American Dreamsicle circa 1943, personally. She’s a spy, but she’s a spy Pepper trusts implicitly, and so I kinda do too. She helped us take down Justin Hammer, legally, and she’s only revealed a tiny fraction of the most embarrassing _faux pas_ I committed around her while she was in my employ to the masses on youtube.”

Bruce nodded a little. “You don’t think she’s too much like Fury, then?”

“I think Fury already figured out she’s a better person than he is, deep down, even though I personally would be willing to bet she’s killed more people. I think that’s only true because of how long she was under the control of certain sorts of other people, and that it’s part of why she doesn’t bother with aspirations of ranking above field-agent despite being almost Steve’s age without nearly so many frozen or lost years, but still a few. So, I personally respect her more than I do him, is all.”

At that, the biochemist nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds worth another shot, then.”

“Good. Thanks. I agree though, that we should get out of here; I swear the light that thing gives off is starting to make me sick.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Like a pressure on the outside of my head making it feel squished. You don’t feel it?”

“To me it’s more... piercing.”

Tony’s expression went very deliberately blank. “ _Coffee_.” He rested a hand gently on Bruce’s shoulder and guided him out. He brought his phone back to his ear again. “JARVIS, hack whatever communicator Natasha’s wearing and ask her to come meet us. Also, plot me a path to where Fury keeps good coffee hidden from most base personnel.”

“Right away, sir. Shall I also begin rendering the room around said coffee-source free of all audio and visual means of spying?”

“That would be marvelous, too, obviously, J.”

“Now in progress, sir. The process will take five minutes, and your walk, if you take your next left, should require six minutes.”

“Perfect.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki's daemon is as sly and underhanded as the trickster himself, and even trickier to keep contained, it turns out.
> 
> She finds more ears willing to hear her case than she anticipated, however.

Natasha looked more than a little wary as she slipped into the room JARVIS had guided her to. “How did you guys find this place, exactly?” That was as close as she would ever come to admitting that she hadn’t known about its existence until now. Zada walked around the perimeter of the room, sniffing around the place and taking in detailed information about the people who more usually spent time there: all high-ranking, all accompanied by Fury upon their visits. She stepped up onto the arm of Natahsa’s chair and whispered as much into her human’s ear, once Natasha sat down opposite the two men in front of her.

Everyone else who had been in this room within the past month had been either accompanied by Nick Fury, or a cleaning robot: not even one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s trusted human clean-up staff. Everyone... except the two mad scientists smiling at her now.

Stark’s daemon was back to her normal behavior, for now, at least. She opened one eye long enough to shoot Zada a bored look after the lynx stared at her silently for several moments, then let it close and tucked her nose back under her tail where she was curled up in a ball in Tony’s lap: happily ignoring the rest of her surroundings.

“So,” Natasha said. “What did you dig up?”

Tony beamed at her, but the assassin was deliberately not looking directly at him; she didn’t want to reward his smug behavior.

Bruce only raised his eyebrows and gestured vaguely. “Well... uh...”

“Loki’s a pawn,” Tony said, crisp and business-like. “Also a traitor, but he still can’t afford to be seen making allies like us, so he’s playing villain. He probably also is doing that a bit to deliberately piss off his big brother and their dad, of course, but I think that’s him looking for anything to take some of the edge off, honestly.”

She blinked at him. “Why the sudden sympathy?”

“I dunno about sympathy,” Bruce cut in. “He’s still out to get us. It’s just that instead of ‘us’ meaning ‘all of Earth’ it only means ‘us’ as in ‘anybody who gets in the way of the show he’s putting on, or who he decides must take part in it.’ So it could be worse, but he’s still pretty much an asshole.”

“Agreed,” Tony said. “Also, he and his daemon both don’t seem to actually balk much at the thought of the body-count they’re leaving behind.”

Bruce and Natasha both looked at him strangely then.

“Before I get further into that, you, big guy, need to keep away from that scepter for a good long while,” the inventor added.

“Why, exactly?” he asked.

“I lied a bit, earlier, when I sort of tripped, or uh, collapsed, maybe. When Ace here was, uh, ‘stuck’ she was actually recklessly provoking someone who decided to put the squeeze on her throat with big pointy teeth, which understandably set off a few alarms, distance aside,” Tony explained.

Bruce’s eyes widened. “You’re joking.”

“She didn’t get anywhere near his cage, and despite some camera glitches, briefly, he and his daemon have been in sight all day, Tony,” Natasha remarked.

“Well, sweetheart, so have I,” Aysel announced, only a bit muffled, because while she apparently had decided to deign to converse with others, she still didn’t consider the effort of uncurling from her comfortable position to be worth making it easier on her listeners.

Natasha raised an eyebrow, realizing that she was right, thus making this doubly impossible, unless she was missing a factor. “You don’t have magic, do you?”

“Strictly tech, Tasha, what do you even take me for?” Tony retorted, scandalized.

“Or me,” the fox concurred, opening one eye again, this time to shoot Natasha a disapproving look.

“So both of you were wandering around this whole helicarrier without anyone the wiser,” the assassin mused. “Well, I feel safer already.”

“I caused her to have a sort of emotional moment and she ran back to Loki, causing the camera glitches along the way, probably,” Aysel added. “You’re welcome. Who knows what she might have otherwise gotten up to. Mind you, I think I got lucky, provoking her, since I now strongly suspect that she’s been a bit _stretched thin_ , lately.” _Her insistent attempts to hide as much were evidence enough in its favor._

“What she might _still_ get up to, you mean?” Natasha asked.

“Only if you don’t have any human eyeballs pointed at him,” Tony said. “Illusions that mimic daemons can’t be much easier to synthesize than holograms. Most magic-based illusions I’ve gotten the S.H.I.E.L.D. breakdowns on are basically the same sorts of tricks-of-the-light, just with different machinery: physical, or metaphysical. Loki’s got ‘alien’ magic, but there’s not too many ways he could really do it differently, that would be detected by cameras at all.”

“You don’t know that for sure, more than 70% tops,” Bruce said. “Also, are we really discussing magic suddenly? Like actual magic?”

“Mind control, aliens, gods with daemons that shape-shift, gods without daemons at all...” Natasha listed. “I’d say magic isn’t too much more far-fetched, right now, Dr. Banner, don’t you think?”

He snorted, but tilted his head down in concession. “I guess so.”

Aysel finally lifted her head, with a long-suffering sigh, like the exertion should be below her. “Look, what I learned was a valuable lesson about being invisible not being the same as being unable to be aimed at by alien feline-at-the-time daemons with big ears, and that for whatever his flaws, the asshole causing us all these problems is trying to get far, far away from someone even more powerful, who has clearly given Loki more than a few nightmares, and made his daemon _watch_ , anytime it was safe enough for her to be anywhere near him, or maybe worse, just see the end results whenever it was safe enough to drop in. She said they couldn’t capture and contain her, but I think it wasn’t for lack of trying. It’d be pure stupidity otherwise.” She took a long, deep breath, and let it out. “They’re not sane. Any empathy they might’ve been capable of before is muted by their fear of whoever they’re running from. Also, consider how much damage this guy has actually done so far, on Earth, compared to what we’ve _seen_ he’s _capable of_.” Her tail lashed back and forth in the ensuing quiet and she looked at each of the others save Tony, making sure she could tell they were actually thinking about it.

“He’s holding back in order to trap us into something worse than he could achieve even as strong as he is now,” Natasha said. “He’s moving pieces into place.”

“But the pieces suck,” Tony pointed out. “This whole setup sucks. And this guy is smarter than that.”

At that, the spy frowned, seriously considering. “So what do you think he really is, then, if not actually out for world domination for the sake of his own ego?” she asked Aysel.

“I think we’re dealing with a killer maniac, but I don’t think he could opt out of being that, even if he tried, right now; I think if he were sedated somewhere secure for a while and given some therapy, he might even stop kick-starting new wars nearly so frequently. And I think maybe you two, of all people on this ridiculous flying boat, probably have a good idea what that’s like, right?”

Bruce and Natasha both looked at each other.

The spy was the first to look away, her expression gone flat, cold and grave. “True enough, but is he capable of regret later? You can’t be certain he’s capable of valuing the lives he’s taken so far. If they mean nothing to him now, what’s to make it so different later?”

“If he survives whatever war he’s arranged to bring down? It probably depends how he’s treated, and how much of the parts of his own mind he buried to keep them out of reach from the people who put a hook in his brain tied to that scepter,” Tony said, “the description of which his daemon gave makes me think about the fact that you and I feel different degrees of discomfort around that scepter, and your word choice on the subject frankly worries me. I just feel _pressure_ from it, but you...”

“Ah,” Bruce said. “Piercing pain. You think that’s literal?”

“I’ve run into telepathic influences before,” Natasha said. “If that’s the first word that came out of your mouth to describe the pain, you should keep away from that scepter, Doc.”

He nodded, slowly. “You have?”

She nodded.

“Was that what he-”

“I’ve had a lot of unpleasant experiences in my line of work,” she interrupted softly. “Ideally, I wish the world didn’t need people with the skills I’ve been forced to acquire; although... I was only allowed to _escape_ the people who trained me in those ways in the first place because I was considered a potentially invaluable S.H.I.E.L.D. asset––and I was only an asset because of _those skills_.” She shrugged and smiled a bit somberly. “I don’t have any illusions about quite how broken the systems around here are, but I try to repair what I can from within, and do good work where I have the most power and opportunities to do so, and for now, that’s here.”

Bruce nodded slowly, understanding. “Sorry.”

She shook her head with a sad smile. “Welcome to the world behind the world, Dr. Banner. It only gets weirder from here. We all trip over occasional culture-shocks eventually.”

He smiled a bit at that. “Yeah.”

Tony’s phone, in his pocket, chimed. He pulled it out and looked at it. His expression fell, then quickly became to angry. In his lap, Aysel sat up, focused only on him, and stepping up onto his chest until he moved the phone where she could see it too. Her eyes widened, then narrowed as her ears flattened back against her skull again as she gave an offended growl.

“Well, _I’m_ encouraged,” Bruce remarked flatly.

Tony flipped through a few things. “We have a bigger problem than Loki, or at least a longer-term one.”

“Aside from whoever is pulling his strings?” Zada asked lightly.

“I’d started to wonder if you were capable of speech other than whispering,” Aysel remarked casually.

“I hadn’t realized you paid me even that much mind,” the lynx shot back.

The fox only shrugged, seeming a little amused.

It occurred to Natasha, not for the first time, that Aysel probably used her reputation for indifference for the sake of listening in on things happening around Tony that the inventor otherwise could not, without anyone thinking she would even have the slightest interest, or considering her a potential eavesdropper at all. She gave a thoughtful hum, smirking at how Aysel then proceeded to very deliberately ignore everyone else again, focusing on Tony’s phone again until he settled on a particular blueprint, and held it up for the others to observe.

Then he waited.

Natasha looked pale as a sheet, caught right between anger, fear, and cold calculation. “You think-”

“Nat. You’re Russian. You’re not allowed to be optimistic about this anymore than I am,” Tony sighed. “That’s tesseract tech, Hydra-inspired, in use for a bomb.”

Bruce’s fingertips reached out to manipulate the image, and focus on a few key parts of it. “This c––this could easily make a nuclear warhead barrage look like a love tap,” he said, his voice quavering just a little, making him lean back in his seat and take a few very slow, deep breaths.

Tony opened his mouth to inquire, but Aysel rested a paw over his lips, observing Cacia keenly as she cuddled close to the biochemist’s throat and emitted low, soothing sounds, helping him calm quickly.

“Sorry,” Bruce said, after a moment.

Tony and Natasha glanced at each other, then back at him.

“We get it, trust me,” said the assassin, “and at this rate, you’ll probably need the other guy sooner rather than later. Not now, but... well.” She looked back at Tony’s phone. “Fury wanted me to question Loki a bit. I’m not so sure it’s a great idea, now.”

“You could just question me,” called a voice from the ceiling.

Natasha had a gun aimed right at it half a second later.

“Easy, Nat, jeez,” Tony said, both of his own hands up and palms-forward reflexively. He had that reaction to guns being pointed at people near him, ever since Afghanistan, and the resulting brief flashback made his head hurt.

“Also that won’t help you,” Na’ilah said. She was disconcertingly back in magpie form, standing on the ceiling like gravity wasn’t her deal. “I’m communicating via an illusion, since you were so kind as to put this little room out of the sight of all. It’s design aids in your endeavor of course; it’s designed not to alert anyone if it happens to be impossible to get eyes and ears in here, just in case Director Fury needs some very special private time here. Charming, isn’t that? Not alarming to your sensibilities _at all_.”

“We get that you’re out to foment dissent,” Zada remarked. “Earth isn’t a difficult place to do that. Anywhere. Anytime.”

“Ah, a charming cat you are, clearly after my own heart,” the trickster’s demon cooed. “Our original plans were to have Barton return to the helicarrier and begin causing chaos, you know.”

“Why tell us now?” Cacia asked.

“Because you’ve already been messing with our script. As such, given my poor bonded mage is not in top form, I thought perhaps I might ally with more clear-thinking persons, whilst I consider making revisions.” She sounded amused.

“You miss him, you’re saying,” Aysel remarked coolly.

Na’ilah’s feathers ruffled and she clicked her beak loudly. “You, I would prefer silent.”

“Too bad,” the fox shot back, openly challenging. “What’ve you got in mind?”

“Well, stopping the portal being opened isn’t an option, before any of you even ask,” Na’ilah said.

“Everything is an option,” Natasha said.

“Not this one. Nor the attack on the helicarrier, and both are inextricably linked. They are also beyond my reach to alter. Furthermore, I cannot steer Loki too far from his... directives, without risking the remains of his mind being wiped out or destroyed when those watching his every action from afar decide his actions are just a bit too traitorous-looking, which is already a balancing act for us, as I’m sure you can understand.”

“God of lies,” Natasha mused, “admittedly isn’t the most trustworthy of titles.”

“I never would have guessed,” Na’ilah scathed. “Do you want your archer back or not, Ms. Romanoff?”

The spy’s expression darkened considerably.

“I thought that would be your answer. I do wish he were in a better state to appreciate you, and that you’d decided to interview him. I could use some quality entertainment, in passing the time, for the next, oh, half an hour at the least,” mused the magpie. “Depending upon your cooperativeness, admittedly.”

“Half an hour until what?” Tony inquired.

“Until Barton arrives, with plenty of backup to support him,” Na’ilah responded. “Control Loki inflicts upon the minds of others via that scepter is actually a tenuous hold. Simple cognitive recalibration can break it. Someone familiar with his fighting style would be ideal to inflict one, knowing best how to do him the least harm.” She cocked her head, staring steadily at Natasha.

The assassin stared back for a few long moments. “How?”

A sigh from the daemon on the ceiling. “Hit him on the head until he loses consciousness. It really is _very_ simple.”

“What about the portal?” Bruce asked. “Where is he opening it?”

“He hasn’t yet given that order, and refused to tell me,” Na’ilah said, bitterness in her voice more than evident.

Tony realized what the final straw was, when it came to this daemon’s tolerance of the (usually) biped she was bonded to. He had no doubt this development was recent. “Why not?”

The magpie looked at him, feathers again ruffled, and yellow eyes narrowed.

“It’s fresh in your mind, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here. Talking to us in the first place,” the inventor continued. “What changed?”

“My voice was faintly detected by the scepter. Speaking to someone other than Loki. Without his knowledge,” she scathed. “As such, I am less than pleased with all of you, except for Ms. Romanoff, who may now very well be my favorite out of this collection of fools I’m having to make do with as potential allies, having as I do nowhere else to turn until such time as it is safe to begin rebuilding the damaged parts of my bond-mate’s psyche, Mr. Stark.”

Aysel’s ears drooped. “I’m so sorry, I-”

“Don’t,” Na’ilah interrupted. “I am not incapable of coping with the fallout. I can survive anything, same as him.” Very deliberately, she smoothed down all of her feathers again, and huffed a bit haughtily; although there was a hint of desperation in both gestures. “To that end, the original plans Loki and I came up with called for an increase in the number of people surrounding the scepter, and tensions amongst them all, to trigger an energy spike from the scepter, in order to signal Barton’s forces. If no spike occurs within the next two hours, Barton will have to use another tactical approach, which will have a far larger body count in the end. I figured I would leave it to you heroes to decide which option you might prefer.”

They all exchanged uneasy glances.

“You don’t have any other means of communication with them?” Bruce asked.

“None. He was an ideal candidate for a solo mission, which I approved of in no small part because it divides the attention of people watching the whole show unfold,” Na’ilah explained succinctly.

Natasha’s expression fell open a little, like she couldn’t help but appreciate the subtleness of this alien daemon’s manipulations and strategic thinking alike. “Clever.”

The magpie gave a small nod in respectful acknowledgement of the compliment from a fellow mastermind. “Thank you, Agent Romanoff.”

“So you’re the one really orchestrating this whole thing, technically,” Tony mused.

Na’ilah clicked her beak again. “Just because I am now altering the plans that myself and my bond-mate concocted when he was last possessed of his full faculties, Mr. Stark, does not mean he is less important in my consideration. I would not be acting now, if I were not certain I could get him to come ‘round to my way of thinking later.”

“Spoken truly like the daemon of a god of lies,” Cacia remarked. “What is your end-goal, if I may ask?”

The magpie seemed amused by that, bobbing her head a little with a thoughtful, very soft chatter, before she answered, “To get him back, of course. To restore his full memories and powers.”

“Powers?” Bruce asked.

“Oh, yes. There is also that, but I’m not sure how much of that I should really tell you all,” Na’ilah mused. “There were some... necessary cutbacks, in order to ensure the failure of this little invasion.”

“You’re saying he’s actually more powerful than this?” Natasha said slowly. “That he could be doing more?”

“He believes, at present, that his magic reserves, the seidr under his skin, have been almost entirely drained, by his own efforts to deliver the both of us here via the tesseract,” the magpie replied. “In reality, he used only half, and most of the remainder, I have under lock and key, metaphysically speaking. Should you all betray me, I’ll release that, of course.”

The biochemist, the spy, and the inventor all took a few moments to let that sink in, and the two daemons in the room with the keenest olfactory senses snorted a little, when the fear coming off of all parties on the floor reached a particularly keen intensity.

“You will fight your upcoming battle alongside Thor, as well,” Na’ilah advised. “Now you have some better idea of the capabilities of such gods, perhaps you might consider how to best use him, hmm?”

“Is he usually more like you?” Aysel asked suddenly. “I’ve seen echoes of this wit, in him, when he speaks to Fury, but you are much less restrained, and more easy in your rapport.”

Na’ilah hesitated. “Why is it, little fox, that you insist upon asking me questions like this?” she muttered, and smoothed down her feathers after puffing up only a little. “ _Yes_ , he is usually far less frozen and numb to behold. Yes, he is playful and his wit is sharper than mine, in ways that I adore, and currently long to see again one day,” she snapped, then exhaled sharply, her annoyance this time directed inward. “My apologies, but this is not easy, for me. Nothing at all, has been _easy_ for me, for quite some time. I have had no one to speak to very much but a shadow, or an animal in pain––both of them are the same man––for rather too long, for any daemon, and I have trouble addressing that pain because I spend all the rest of my time trying to ignore it, as I’m sure some of you can imagine.”

The others nodded stiffly, trying not to imagine her pain very vividly, but mostly failing. It was too raw, in the strange daemon’s voice, too inescapable, despite her strained, slightly curt words.

Loki’s daemon nodded back at them, looking away from them for a moment. “I am aware that the sacrifices my bond-mate and I have made, and will continue to make here, are beyond what you all consider acceptable, morally, and I’m also very glad none of you have shot at me so far.”

“You don’t regret doing any of it though, do you?” Aysel muttered. “I got that impression earlier.”

The magpie whipped her head up and around to glare at her sharply, then visibly huffed. “You would’ve mentioned it earlier.”

“No. I still wanted to hear what you had to say,” the fox assured. She then gave a thoughtful hum and declared: “So. We should, as quietly as possible, start evacuating New York City.”

“What?” Bruce asked sharply.

“Where else can you think of a frightfully obvious, publicly visible and recently very famous, monument to mankind’s technological achievements, upon which to stage a farcical alien invasion which you melodramatically designed around the concept of humanity not being ready for such power as the gods and their like do hold?” Aysel proposed, amusement in her voice.

Na’ilah’s beak might have been hanging open ever since the little fox had recommended a city’s evacuation, and she also might have only snapped it shut after a small squeak escaped her a few moments after that explanation. “Pardon?”

“I’ll second that,” Bruce said, distinctly uneasy.

“Well, we’ve already acknowledged the machinations we can’t change, most of them Barton-centric,” Tony said slowly. “And the only way to really reduce civilian casualties, at this point, then-”

“You can’t be serious,” Natasha deadpanned.

“Look, Na’ilah, you said we have up to two hours before Barton implements some sort of hyper-violent Plan B, right?” Tony asked. “Because you and Loki were both cocky enough to decide you could probably improvise a better Plan B if Plan A didn’t actually pan out, but he’s no longer on your trusted list for strategy consultation, yeah, I got it. So, give us an hour, and I can probably get most of the area around Stark Tower evacuated, away from the main points of focus from beyond the void, or whatever, wherever you and Loki were.” He looked at the others. “We can set up the invasion to fail in parallel with hers and Loki’s plans, and minimize the number of civilians in and around the main battle zone. If we spent most of that hour on moving people out of the region mostly around Stark Tower, we can avoid causing major traffic jams or city-wide panic as long as possible, so that we can get the most people the furthest away from where most of this is going to go down, given how little time we have. From there, we continue with the rest of Manhattan island working outward from that first region, but it’ll start to get messy once there’s real panic, which the invasion is going to trigger no matter what, so let’s use what time we’ve got, right?”

Bruce and Nat exchanged pointed looks.

“It feels a bit too much like cooperation,” the biochemist said slowly.

“Only to the extent that we’ve already concluded we can’t actually stop the portal being opened, which, Nat, you have any ideas on stopping it? I’m out,” the inventor sighed.

Natasha frowned slightly. “No, nothing that I could arrange for in time.”

Tony held up both hands, palms up. “Sounds like I’ve got work to do. You two... come up with a way to make a scene near the lab relating to the scepter, but Bruce, listen to your head. If you get too close and it feels sharp or uncomfortable like it was for us back in there earlier, you fallback. Right?”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, Dr. Banner, how doomed do you think we are?” the assassin wondered aloud.

“I’d say at least an 8,” Bruce responded.

“But you’ll do it?” the inventor asked.

“Yes,” Natasha sighed, at the same time the scientist and his parrot nodded.

“Good. Excellent. I’ll find you when you both start arguing in about an hour and fifteen minutes, then?”

They nodded.

“You’re aiming us at your tower?” Na’ilah asked, a bit disconcerted.

“Yeah. If you’re going to try to knock this thing out of the sky, and I have a feeling you will,” Tony expounded, “then I’m probably gonna need another suit of armor, amongst some other sundry things.” He waved a hand in a dismissive gesturer. “Might as well send you there, in time for me to go pick it up.”

The magpie on the ceiling stared at him, head tilted askew to fix him with the stare of one bright yellow eye. “I see, then. Thank you.” She cleared her throat quietly. “All of you.” She then vanished abruptly.

“Do we seriously believe that she can cast her own independently-functioning astral projections without either Loki _or_ S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance noticing?” Natasha asked, unnerved and just a little bemused.

“I think, honestly, she might be abusing power she’s, er, supposed to be keeping on lockdown, maybe?” Bruce suggested. “You know. Shouldering half the usual bag of cats more than usual, give or take one or two to keep tussling away in Loki’s skull to make sure it doesn’t look actually empty?”

“You’re probably right,” Aysel muttered. “It does seem to take her two or three tries to completely disappear even her illusory projections, and that seems a bit too clumsy, almost.”

Everyone else in the room turned to give her almost the exact same concerned look, except Bruce and (to an only slightly lesser degree) Cacia, who both seemed still a little more uncertain in their conclusions.

Even Tony.

The fox’s ears drooped a little. “Okay, why are you all looking at me like that? It’s creepy as hell.”

“Seriously?” Tony asked, a bit disturbed.

“What?” Aysel insisted, increasingly frustrated. “Seriously, _what_?”

“Your behavior around Na’ilah seems, in my limited experience so far, to differ drastically from how you more normally behave around others in her absence,” Cacia explained slowly.

“Yes, that,” Zada concurred. “But with _longer experience_ , in our case.”

The fox’s mouth hung open for a moment, then snapped shut again. “Uhm.”

Tony chose that moment to raise a hand. “Give us a bit. You guys go plan, and argue a bit, or something, okay?”

After a few minor protests, he managed to successfully banish them, not to return until they had completed their task. Tony then got JARVIS started on making the calls necessary to start evacuating various buildings around Stark tower, as quietly and not-alarmingly as possible. A lot of the calls wound up being political, and he had to involve Pepper, and apologize a lot, and explain a lot, and then explain to a few important local politicians as well. He did quite a lot of talking, for over a solid half an hour, before he took a break and looked back down at his daemon, who had curled up between his left arm and his stomach and stayed there ever since the others had retreated from the room. “Ace?” he prompted softly.

“There are far too many days, with you, that some aspects of our insanity are so inextricably linked to one another that our co-dependence makes me a little embarrassed,” she said flatly.

“Not exactly the most promising start to any discussion.”

Aysel tucked her face under both forelegs for a moment with a huffed sigh of exasperation. “I was trying not to think about it, because I could see mysteries that I knew the right questions to pry up, and how many of them I’d never get to see if I didn’t provoke them myself, and I like them.” Her ears flicked back. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It _doesn’t_ mean anything.”

“Would you want it to, if things were different?” Tony asked softly.

A long whine was her response.

Scratching the top of her head, the inventor smirked a bit self-deprecatingly. “You’re confused, then.”

“I don’t like it,” she muttered. “Help me.”

“With?”

“I... don’t know.”

“Wow, that’s unhelpful.”

“Look, if I’m feeling this, you are a bit, too, aren’t you?” she snapped. “ _Help_ me.”

Tony looked deeply conflicted.

“Ah-haa!” the fox accused.

“Hey, hang on, wait a minute.”

“You like them too!”

“Well, maybe, a bit, but-”

“Bullshit,” she snapped.

Tony hesitated again.

Claws digging into his chest a bit further, Aysel insisted, “You’re trying not to think about it either. The whole damn time?”

“It was _still your_ idea!” Tony groaned. “You just clicked, with her, and it was bizarrely fascinating and terrifying, but you never do that! Ever! What the hell did you think you were even doing getting that close to a potential violent and horrible death, Ace? _And_ then seeing the results, how could I not start thinking maybe you were onto something I was missing?”

She reached up to paw at his face. “No, you’re shutting up. You get the appeal, you saw some of what I’ve sort of... seen? Picked up on.” She huffed. “Felt? W-well.” A cough, as she briefly recalled the initial reaction to being pinned down by Na’ilah’s teeth. Fear had not been the only thrilling jolt involved.

The inventor may have blushed a bit.

“I am way too happy that it hasn’t been just me, to even feel a little bit sorry for laughing at how much you currently resemble a tomato,” Aysel remarked, her voice smirking more than her affectionate expression quite did.

“Shut up,” Tony groaned. “She was trying to kill you! That’s not right!”

“I wholeheartedly agree.”

“Good. Great. Thank you.”

“Except it also felt kind of amazing a bit,” she whimpered. “Like kind of awkwardly so, because she was still really obviously thinking about killing me, so it was also sort of self-defeating, as turn-ons go, but, uh-”

“Please stop,” Tony sighed. “Just stop.”

“But you-”

“It was really uncomfortable timing,” Tony snapped. “I was in the lab with Bruce, and tripped and fell on my face. There is a limit to how positively I’m going to be able to recollect that experience.”

“Trust me, I _know_ , your panic really sort of ruined the mood.”

“You were going to die!”

“Ah! She didn’t kill me, though!”

“Did you really know that she wouldn’t at the time?”

“Uhm... yes, actually.”

“Bullshit.”

“I did!” Aysel insisted. “She was following plans. You were in those plans: you, your inventions, and _us_ and what we’re capable of. Killing me was not an option, no matter what I happened to know, because I was being cloaked and she wasn’t visible and leaving any evidence, so anything I heard from her, while I was somewhere other than on-camera, would clearly be evidence of weird mind-control crap, or something else Loki-related and dismissible as hallucination. I could see that, all of it, so clear. So she lashed out because she couldn’t stop violent reaction, but she didn’t follow through because she still had enough presence of mind to know she wasn’t allowed. She’s loyal, same as me, Tony. Same as _all_ of us.” She snorted. “I knew, okay? I did.”

Tony let his head loll back for a moment. “Still, you made an insanely bad decision when-”

“I have known _you_ for your _entire life_. Trust me, I know _where_ and _how_ I fucked up, here,” she chided. “I really do, but you’re not going to make me regret it.”

At that, the inventor looked thoughtful and a bit stunned. “Really?”

“Yeah.” She raised one foreleg in a sort of shrug, then pawed at his shirt instead. “I can’t exactly say why I’m that convinced, exactly, but I am.”

“That’s creepy.”

“How d’you think _I_ feel?” she grumbled.

He scratched behind her ears with both hands this time, smiling crookedly despite himself. “It’s serious, though?”

She nodded a bit, trying and failing to disguise it as an attempt to arch up for more scratchings.

“How did it actually feel, though? When, you were close to her...”

“Like getting a taste of flying, just a little bit,” his daemon murmured. “Really flying. Like with my own armor. Mind you, it was going into a violent tailspin, but that didn’t take the edge off much.”

Tony considered. He couldn’t help his first involuntary reactions, though, in his own head. His daemon, of course, felt it through their bond and cleared her throat.

“I had an inkling that you’d be horrified by that one, yeah.”

“Sorry. It’s just... you’re sure, that it’s not... that with-”

“I love Pepper,” she said softly. “I love her, and Aanjay is perfect and I love him too, I do, even his ridiculous tufted ears, but they don’t make me feel like this, and it’s honestly pretty terrifying to me, too.”

Tony further cradled his arms around her until she was curled up, bonelessly relaxed, though he could feel her pulse was pounding very, very fast, and held close and not-too-tightly, feeling all wrapped up. She sighed warmly at the offered comfort.

Most daemons resonated with a different frequency hum, more felt than audible, given what they were mostly made of––(Dust and tricks of the light, and other energy forces still not yet fully understood by science) but a number of things about Afghanistan had caused them both to... change a bit. So Aysel had begun to feel heavier than before, after he had stabilized the arc reactor and began his meticulously planned ascent from his own ashes, there in the dark, power pulsing under his hands and his daemon about his neck. So she had seemed more solid still later, after Yinsen had installed the reactor, and she had slept atop it protectively, covered in flecks of sweat, dust, and Tony’s blood––only atop her head and down her back where she had been unable to reach it and clean it off herself––until Tony had wiped it away.

Back in the present, aboard the helicarrier, listening to the sound of Dust that hummed less smoothly than before Afghanistan––because it had begun to resemble a heartbeat as soon as the reactor had been snapped into place and she had touched it––he rested his chin atop her head, when she tucked her face down against his throat furtively. “Okay.”

“But they-”

“Hey, it’s-”

“Tony, don’t you dare try to play like the more emotionally mature member of this damned bond for so much as a second,” she accused.

He was laughing at himself as much as at her, then, a he was overcome with a brief fit of giggles that might have bordered a bit on the hysterical. “ _Calm down_ , so I can calm down, and we can both work on trying to approach this in a way someone might mistake for almost sane, at least at first glance, okay? Okay. Gooood.”

She sighed a little, relaxing again. “Yeah, fine, okay. Way to sound like a meditation tape.”

“See, you’re better already.”

Aysel snorted at him.

“So. Loki.”

She squirmed a little. “... You have to admit he’s pretty?”

“Really, that’s your opening gambit?”

“He’s smart and charming and maybe not entirely a sociopath if you can give him some time to do major psyche-based repairs? I’m sure he’ll be almost good as new? I really have no help for you here. He’s crazy, right now, and I don’t even know if he can come back from it, but I really hope so, because I want to see Na’ilah’s other half unmuted; how could he _not_ be astonishing, I ask you?”

“Wow, you’re infatuated. Wow. Wow, okay, let me try not to panic some more, just for a minute or so.”

She squirmed some more. “Dammit, Tony, you _asked_!”

“You’re smitten. How are you––I mean, just... _you_ , seriously––so smitten?”

“If I knew, I’d have told you already!”

“Why?”

“See previous answer!”

“You’ve gotta have a couple ideas by now, or you’d have dropped it.”

She grumbled and struggled half-heartedly for a moment before going limp again when he tightened his grip warningly. “They’re––important. And chaotic, and brilliant, and sort of broken, but they’re gorgeous and sort of fascinating, and the first time I saw her, I wanted to be closer. Instantly.” She burrowed her face a bit against him. “I’m sorry.”

“Why sorry?”

“I don’t _make sense_ anymore,” she whined.

“I think that’s an exaggeration. We’ve never made that much sense in the first place, and you know it.”

“But I understood how we didn’t make sense, before, and this, I can’t even explain to myself,” Aysel confessed softly.

“Maybe it’s not a puzzle we have enough of the pieces to solve just yet?”

“You’re saying I’ve lost my marbles?”

“No, more just––you’re impatient?”

“That’s not reassuring to hear ever, but especially in this context, and when I can hear the tentative question mark.”

“With Pepper, you said you trusted her instantly.”

Again, squirming.

Tony sighed, tightening his grip a little, until she stopped. “Not quite the same, with them, I take it?”

“‘Trust’ might be the wrong word?”

“Not reassuring. What words would you use instead?”

“Uhm.” She twitched and audibly fretted for a long moment. “Want, a lot, but not even possessive, just... I want to know them. They’re as fascinating as quantum mechanics, just to listen to, and I want to pull more words from them, and hear them both converse. So I guess I feel mostly want, with a side of maybe um breathless anticipation.” The last part trailed off into a barely-recognizable mumble.

Tony still caught it. He whistled, impressed. “Wow.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“I... it’s not...” She huffed. “I never thought I’d be like this and it’s embarrassing. I am entirely ridiculous and for once I can’t even explain it away and prove I know what I’m doing more than, you know, most people, I guess! That’s just not _right_ , for me!”

“You mean the part where as soon as they showed up, you suddenly became almost mistakable for a people-pleaser, and then determinedly refuse to get flustered whenever anyone points out the behavioral shift until _after_ Na’ilah has left the room?”

“Shut _up_.”

“It’s been really entertaining, actually. You should do the joining-in-plotting with others more, like this. It’s good, seeing this new side of you.”

“I sort of don’t want to, as much, when they aren’t in the audience, though, and I don’t know why they’re that important, but that’s how it feels,” Aysel confessed softly.

Tony kissed the top of her head, then. “We’ll figure it out. We’re geniuses.”

“Then why do I still feel completely ridiculous?”

“Because you’re that too. Welcome to the club.”

“Damn.”

Tony smirked down at her. “Look, don’t sweat it yet. You said yourself that you know what we need to do about them, for now, for their own sake as much as ours and all of Earth’s, at this point. Maybe this crush is all it will ever be, maybe not, but it’s clear that depends on... how they do after we get through this. We’ll stay as we are when it’s over, and rebuild, and if this is really that important, I think it’d be pretty unlikely if we _didn’t_ meet them again. Right?”

“That’s... usually the case. But what if-”

“I mean, we’re kind of ridiculously important to this whole planet, these days. When gods come a’knockin’, S.H.I.E.L.D. calls us immediately. They _need_ us.”

“But what if Asg-”

“Is anything beyond what we’ve already addressed here, even in our control?”

She hesitated. “Aw, now you’re pulling this trick on me, too?”

“You inspired me.”

“Asshole.”

“Relax, okay? I’m sort of ridiculously proud of how amazing you are right now, and I’m inclined to continue to bask, inexplicable new celebrity crushes aside.”

“Celebrity? Really?”

“He’s a god. They were the original celebs of the world, along with other mythic archetypes and all.”

“Ha,” she deadpanned, “ha. ha. You’re not that funny.”

“You just wish you’d thought of it.”

“Do not,” she growled, without much conviction.

“Yeah. You do.”

“JARVIS, start evacuation stage three,” Aysel said loudly.

“Now in progress.”

“Thanks, J,” Tony muttered.

“Isn’t it being disingenuous, though?” she muttered. “Disrespectfully so...”

“How important are you willing to let them be if they don’t come back on their own?”

“... I can see that being Pepper-dependent.”

“Ouch. I was really trying not to go there.”

“You thought it. I thought it. We both know what the headlines would be, if I’d had this reaction to _anyone else’s_ daemon _anywhere_ more public than a top-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, and that Pepper would probably preemptively end the whole relationship thing, because she’s not-so-secretly a total romantic about that sort of crap, and we hate that we can’t seem to give her that as much as we wish that we could.”

“Ouch further, please stop.”

“I _know_.”

“And you mean the ‘sort of crap’ you just flailed over emotionally for like over-”

She sighed loud enough to cut him off. “I **_know_**.”

“Yeah,” he concurred. “Total horse-shit we should completely disregard.”

“Agreed, 100%,” the fox mumbled.

A long pause followed.

“Didn’t think that’d work,” Tony lamented.

“Me neither.”

“Did you want it to?”

“Kind of, yeah. While it’s still...” She raised her head enough to inhale a little fresher air. “Before it gets any worse, because it’s not painful, and it’s not making me pity them or... Well, not want them imprisoned after wreaking war and havoc down here, either. It’s very confusing.”

“You think it could get worse, though?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s the only reason I really haven’t completely freaked out, and all. I know this is mild.”

“Mild.”

“When I’m away from them. Around Na’ilah, obviously, I’m practically tripping over myself to get closer, but at a distance? It’s like I want to be friends. I want to be friends like... back when we first saw Rhodey and Kaia across a room at school and heard them bickering like we bicker and just I sort of knew... something.” She squirmed a little, not in any attempt to escape or actually struggle, but instead settling in again further this time. “Like seeing them across the room and really hoping they’ll eventually come back from the principal’s office so we can get to know them better.”

“I think I can live with that.”

“Me too, so far; although, I honestly might have factored ‘do I really want to double the total guilt in this bond sooner rather than later’ into most of my calculations whenever I decided to not introspect on this subject or discuss this with you before now.”

“Oh, I know. I don’t blame you. I’d do the same, probably.”

She snorted. “Well, yeah. Obviously.” The relief in her voice might have been a bit too obvious for her to be as sarcastic as she had hoped she would sound.

“And this is why you usually don’t talk to people.”

“It’s not,” she protested.

“Isn’t it?”

She huffed. “Well, there’s our pride to consider.”

Tony snorted. “Right. Pride.”

“Yes,” insisted the fox.

“We’d better have that, since it’s clear we have no dignity.”

“For that, I blame you,” she sniffed.

“You didn’t complain much, at the time.”

“Well I was usually having fun, but you’re the legally responsible one.”

Tony groaned. “Not this again.”

“Ha. I win.”

“JARVIS, start stage four.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

Aysel nosed at his jaw and throat insistently until he let go of her enough that she could clamber up to settle around his neck comfortably instead of being held down. “This is gonna be a long day, isn’t it?”

“You bet,” Tony sighed. “How are Nat and Bruce doing, J?”

“I am helping them to avoid most of Agent Romanoff’s superiors on-base, while they continue to plot, sir.”

“Perfect.”

“Unless we’ve miscalculated something,” Aysel mused.

“Like what?” Tony jeered.

“Well. How important whoever is after them knows his daemon to be to his survival,” the fox suggested. “That’s one I just came up with.”

The inventor scowled a bit. “Why would that be a problem?”

“He refused to share information with her, Tony,” she said quietly. “That’s the sort of thing that can get anyone killed on a battlefield, and we know that’s where we’re headed to, now.”

Tony’s frown deepened. “Oh.”

“Yes, you see it now.”

“I do,” he groaned. “This sucks. This really sucks. Who is in charge of causing you to get crushes on people? I’d like to register a formal complaint due to the threats to life and limb this could cause for us.”

“Can and will cause, more like. And last I tried, their office wasn’t taking calls.”

“Bastards!” Tony gasped.

Aysel started giggling despite herself, at that, and did so intermittently a few more times, spread out across the rest of the early-evacuation stages for New York City, until it was showtime.

 

~~

 

Eventually, they decided to stage things around Loki, a bit. It seemed the thing to do; although while Natasha started there, Tony went back into the lab with the scepter in it (she insisted that a certain star-spangled soldier was bound to show up there, since she had earlier seen him on security footage doing something subversive-looking) and Bruce headed towards the bridge, where he found Coulson reassuring Thor that Dr. Jane Foster was safely out of harm’s way.

“Very remote,” the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent assured. “She’ll be safe.”

“Thank you,” Thor murmured, his expression warming, then becoming further grave again. “It’s no accident, Loki’s kidnapping of Dr. Selvig.”

“So you mentioned,” Bruce said, “yeah.” He smiled harmlessly at both men when they turned suddenly to look at him.

Coulson’s daemon––an Egyptian fruit-bat, who spent most of the day tucked against the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent’s chest, under his suit-jacket––poked his head over one lapel and gave an interested squeak of inquiry. “How’s the hunt for the cube going?” Phil asked.

“It’s in progress, but it’s mostly down to number-crunching now,” Bruce said. “Since we have a globe full of relevant data. Also, being around the spear itself for too long isn’t advisable for anyone. It’s got a low-level telepathic field of some sort, and it seems to be seeing random energy spikes now.” He hesitated, and looked pointedly at Thor. “Is there any way you can think of that Loki, Dr. Selvig, or anyone else, might be trying to communicate some messages with that scepter, by means not exactly common on earth? Something _you_ might have more experience with?”

The Thunderer hummed, thoughtful. “Loki, perhaps, though I know not what he would wish to communicate, or with whom, at present; his deals are already all made and he is simply waiting for his cue and for the next act to start.”

“You’re certain of that?” Coulson asked.

“I could tell, by his manner. He displayed some of what few tells he still has not trained away, because he is too fond of wielding them. Why?”

“Well, I’m mostly curious because the whole interior structure of his scepter is acting like a transmitter/receiver for some unusual forms of energy. _Lots of it_ , but where it’s going to, and coming from, is a bit harder for Tony and I to discern,” Bruce explained. “Some of it is doubtlessly the give-and-take of power from its connection to the tesseract, but there’s a lot of other just... stuff, that we can’t decode. It may not even be code; it might just be a language we’ve never seen before. It’s nothing Loki’s consciously affecting right now; that we can tell, if only because it didn’t show any significant differences behavior during his recent minor freak-out about an hour ago. So, it would be either subconscious, or not him, or... it’s just plain someone else. Maybe his deal-broker is getting antsy?”

Thor’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps so. It is... communicating?”

Bruce nodded.

“Without my brother’s attention? It behaves _independently_ of his _conscious will_?” he murmured. “That does not sound like a thing my brother would ever allow. His pride as a mage is too great. He prefers to get credit for his tricks.”

“I sort of got that impression,” the biochemist agreed.

“You did say there was someone he planned to give the cube to, in exchange for that army of, er, ‘Chitauri’ was it?” Coulson suggested.

Thor nodded. “Yes. I had not stopped, before, to consider what measures they might have taken, in effort to make certain of my brother’s loyalty.”

“That might be pertinent for some of us to know, certainly,” Fury said, stepping down a nearby set of stairs to join them. “It can rule out a number of ways we might consider collecting information, if there’s a possibility of turning him against whoever he made this devil’s bargain with. He’s good at betrayal, right?”

The god of thunder shot him a sudden glare, at that. “Choose your words more diplomatically, for the time being, please, Director Fury. Given how exactly my brother... fell, it is more than possible that where he landed was not...” He hesitated. “Actually that would explain quite a lot.”

“You think he might’ve been tortured?” Bruce asked gently.

“Loki... has known torture, before. I have seen him recuperate from more than one occasion, in the past. His behavior, since his arrival on Earth, is not too unlike his behavior then, if I were to consider some of his more bombastic declarations to be mere misdirection, instead of true conviction. It is always troublesome to tell, with him, but _he was_ already losing his grip on reality when he did _fall_. Since then he... admittedly has lied less artfully than he should have been able, even to me.” His brow furrowed. “He said that I ‘tossed’ him into an abyss, but he fell. He let go, rather than let myself or Odin pull him back from the destruction of the bïfrost that he had made so necessary. Usually, he has care to at least get enough facts correct that I am made to feel more adequately guilty, rather than annoyed by his inaccuracy. It really is _truly_ unlike him.”

“You’re suddenly sure something is more off than it appears because he wasn’t lying to you skillfully enough?” the biochemist asked, amused. Cacia gave a few, quietly amused clicks of her beak as well.

“I know my brother. Sincerity may have never been his strongest suit, but he has always taken the _utmost_ pride in his capacity for deceit. He would not stoop so.”

“We’d have to take your word for that, since you _are_ slightly biased,” Phil pointed out gently. “He’s your brother. He knows how to lie to you.”

“Precisely, Son of Coul. He has had centuries of practice, so this blemish on his record for inspiring conviction in his audience is genuinely disturbing.”

Coulson shot Bruce a pleading look. _Help me out here_.

“Unless he was trying to deliberately leave room for you to doubt his intentions,” the scientist added. “You’re still coming to this conclusion quickly.”

“Perhaps. I do not believe my brother controlled directly. He is too much himself otherwise for that, but perhaps he is being... observed.” He glanced quickly at Bruce.

“We considered that,” Bruce murmured. “Saying he’s untrustworthy is practically redundant. Is there really a trustworthy god of lies? Who wouldn’t want a bit of _security_ , to make sure he keeps his end of _any_ sort of bargain, right?”

“But you also think that he may have been tortured in this person’s custody,” Phil cut in. “Why would they, if they just planned to monitor him later too? Why not lead with the carrot instead of the stick?”

“Perhaps it was not their first tactic,” Thor suggested. “There are... forces in the galaxy which do convert people into weapons, and attempt to break them, but if my brother could not quite be broken by them, they may have had to make do.” He frowned deeply. “He is... known for his resilience. He has been tortured before, but his will was never broken by it. I would know if that much had changed.” He swallowed tightly. “He would be very different indeed, if he had truly been brought close to that breaking point again, or closer still than ever before.”

"You’re really sure of that?" Cacia asked, very gently.

Thor met the grey parrot's stare steadily. "Yes. I am. Far more people on this planet would have been killed, and he would not be so lucid."

The others didn’t meet one another’s gazes, or Thor’s, for a few seconds, after that revelation, unsure how to feel about the slightly stricken look of grudging certainty the Thunderer’s expression held in it.

"So what are the odds he already sort of plans to betray them, you think?" Bruce inquired, trying very hard not to think about the repeat-torture experiences the Thunder god had referred to, and how eerily certain he sounded, concerning what Loki would be like devoid of will. It was making him worry more about sending a possibly-genocidal god of chaos to the only place (so far known to earthlings on this helicarrier, he was pretty sure) that stood any chance of being able to contain the likes of Loki, against his will or otherwise. It was making him wonder if maybe Asgard had been more responsible for how morally spare Loki was, after enough centuries of exposure to certain attitudes toward himself, in a place that could produce two brothers so disparate from one another in personality as the likes of the merciless and bombastic Lie-smith, and this sagely sensitive, yet stoic Thunder god.

 _Bag of cats_ , he reminded himself sharply. _Bag. of. Cats. Just don’t._

Slow realization dawned as Thor looked upon the biochemist with new eyes. "Very high, unless they have some way to incapacitate his mind or his will, remotely, should he betray them."

"You think he wouldn't betray them, if they've got something they're holding over him?" Phil asked.

"If it is destruction of his mind entire? Yes. Or, perhaps, a threat to Na'ilah. I would suggest possibly a threat to his children, but if he suspected them of that, he would have self-destructed first, rather than give them reason to pursue a fruitless vendetta."

"Does this sound possible to you, Dr. Banner? Genuinely?" Fury inquired.

"With the scepter being as abuzz as it is, right now, that wouldn't be too far-fetched. It doesn't absolve him of anything _much_ , since it still basically means the body-count he's racked up so far has been strictly in the service of keeping his own ass intact,  and ‘putting on a good show’ and to hell with everybody else. I mean, he clearly values his own life way more than the eighty-plus people he’s killed just so far."

"Admittedly, even before his fall, I would have questioned whether he would be capable of that particular form of self-sacrifice, I will admit," rumbled Thor. “He was never exactly a naturally _selfless_ creature, except when it came to his own children.”

"Color me unsurprised," the Director deadpanned. Then he made a face. "Well, actually, the part where he has kids he would dote on is a bit surprising, but okay. People are multifaceted, I’m familiar with the concept. That said: here on Earth, we have such a thing as an insanity plea. Alternately, he could be considered to be acting ‘under duress’ from these other forces."

"I would not mistake my brother's actions for other than deliberate," the Thunderer added. "He is nothing if not dangerously clever, and perpetually underhanded. If someone has a hook in his mind through which they watch him, he might go to great lengths to guard against them. He has done so only once before though they managed to bury more of his will rather deeper, and the results were bloody. We were lucky to have been able to extradite him from the Kree back then, and luckier still that we were able to prove what tactics were used against him to bring him to that mental state, had all been in severe breach of galactic law.” The god took a deep breath for a moment, old anger flashing across his expression, the likes of which made everyone present feel like lighting was about to strike them, just for a few seconds, before he exhaled slowly, and then concluded, “He is... more _controlled_ , now, than when we found him then, but there is a similar hollowness to his voice––a lack of conviction."

Bruce nodded, looking thoughtful, but still concerned.

Something difficult to read flickered across Coulson's expression. "Kree?"

"You've heard of them?" Thor inquired.

"Not 'heard' exactly," he murmured. "There weren't any survivors from their crashed ship, but we managed to get enough information from their systems to translate some of their language. Figuring out what they called themselves was easy-ish, from there," he admitted.

"Wait," Bruce started. "More aliens?"

"A few months after his appearance in New Mexico, yes," Coulson explained, nodding toward Thor. "There were no weapons salvageable, nor anything further learned from it. Too much was lost to high-intensity heat inside and outside of the ship. We still don't even know who shot them down." If Fury might have detected one or two of Phil's subtler tells indicative of lies, he certainly didn't mention it. _Yet_.

"Right. Great. Glad we cleared that up," the biochemist muttered, clearly a bit annoyed. "Any other alien fly-bys or anything we might've missed too?"

"No, Dr. Banner. Not to my knowledge," Phil assured. After seeming to consider a moment, he turned expectantly toward Fury with eyebrows raised, his bat daemon perking up his fox-like ears in a show of similar interest.

Fury shook his head. "No. Nothing else yet, except Loki, who so far remains the only one on this boat who looks like he want to be here. Whatever his plans are, he's already using us for them. We just need to know how."

"We can check on how Tony's doing in the lab. It's not exactly fascinating stuff, just raw data processing, so it might be good to distract him, probably, before he gets bored and starts taking things apart," Bruce suggested. “Also, maybe Thor can look at the scepter, see if he can detect anything we might not be able to, of a magic sort perhaps.”

The others all concurred, some more reluctantly than others, and in Thor’s case with apparent bittersweet amusement. They followed Bruce out, after Fury muttered something to Coulson which may or may not have been the reason for his staying standing where he was, while the others strode off toward the lab; also, just possibly, he might’ve had a bit of data to quietly bury concerning a high-priority project he had been recently put in charge of, before Loki's explosive arrival onto the scene, with intent to deposit it just a bit deeper underneath all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s various layers of increasingly-secure encryption.

There was only so much deeper they could hide T.A.H.I.T.I., though.

 

~~

 

"There are very few people able to sneak up on me," Loki greeted the spy, turning to smile at her charmingly.

His daemon was petulantly taking up most of the space on the bench behind him, once again in the form of a black panther. Upon closer inspection, Natasha could discern that the cat was a common leopard, rather than a jaguar, based on how her spots caught the light. She had known a few people with both sorts of big cat daemons, during the course of her career. Most of them were terribly calm, terribly powerful people with limited patience for dealing with fools.

They were also susceptible, however, to having their perceptiveness flattered.

"But you guessed I'd come," she remarked.

"After," Loki corrected, his polite mask not masking his mirth, but also not masking just how cracked and stiff his whole demeanor still was. Like parts of him, even now, still hadn't fully thawed from his trip through the void. Or perhaps he had frozen over quite like this long before he made that journey. Natasha kept both options noted, undecided yet as to which might be the more likely, as Loki continued, " _After_ whatever tortures Fury can concoct, you would appear as a friend, as a _balm_." He paused, then, smiling open and playful; although the brightness of it did not quite reach his eyes, in which malice was a bit too close to the surface. A little more softly, he concluded, "And I would cooperate."

"I want to know what you've done to Agent Barton, so far," she said, in a voice devoid of inflection.

The god chuckled. "I'd say I've expanded his mind."

"And once you've won––once you're king of the mountain--then what _happens_ to his _mind_?”

Loki shot her a curious, surprised and almost-disbelieving sort of look. "Is this _love_ , Agent Romanoff?"

"Love is for children. I owe him a debt."

Thoughtful, and with an air of infinite patience, the god of lies stepped back, and lowered himself to sit on the narrow space available at one end of the bench. His daemon had to swiftly curl up her tail to avoid him resting on it, as a result, and she shot him a brief, annoyed glare. Ignoring it, Loki prompted the little spy, "Tell me."

Na'ilah snorted. "Don't," she muttered.

The trickster shot her a look, annoyed.

She shot him one in return.

Ignoring her again, he refocused on Natasha.

She sat down, and Zada sat down beside her, tufted ears pricked forward towards the trickster. "Before I worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., I ... made a name for myself. I have a very specific skill-set. I didn't care who I used it for, or on. I got on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar in a bad way. Agent Barton was sent to kill me; he made a different call."

He asked casually, "And what will you do if I vow to spare him?"

" _Not_ let you out," she assured.

"Ah, no. But I _like_ this," he said, lightly vicious and far too viciously amused. "Your world in the balance, and you bargain for one man?"

"Regime's fall everyday. I tend not to weep over that, I'm Russian––or I was."

"And what are you now?"

She shrugged. "It's really not that complicated. I've got red in my ledger; I'd like to wipe it out."

"Can you?" Loki asked as his smile faded, his voice sounding almost sincerely concerned for her emotional well-being: like a friend’s voice. Like the sigh of an old, wise thing. " _Can_ you wipe out that _much_ red?" His light tone didn't change, as he listed slowly, like each one was a sad and sobering question, delivered almost clinically: "Drakoff's daughter? São Paulo? The hospital fire?" He rose to his feet, stalking slowly toward the glass, and her sitting now so close to it, until he drew close enough that she rose to her feet to meet him, and stare him down as he snarled, "Barton told me everything, of course. Your ledger is _dripping_ , it's _gushing red_ , and you think saving one man no more _virtuous_ than yourself will change anything?" He gave a half-breathless laugh, crueler than before, as his voice went lower and less smooth, then: "This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer. _Pathetic_!”

Na'ilah sat up, strolling toward the god slowly, her expression and feelings on the whole matter both indecipherable.

The god continued, "You lie and kill in the _service_ of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are _a part_ of you, and they will _never_ go away."

Cutting him off, his daemon further interrupted, in condescending tones, "We won't barter to spare your feelings, as I'm sure you've already guessed, Agent Romanoff." She raised her head proudly. "You have not made any offers we might even begin to consider, and so clearly you want something else entirely."

Loki hesitated, seeming to question himself just briefly as he glanced down at the panther brushing her shoulder subtly against the side of his left knee, but his mask recovered quickly, and he smiled bright and cheerful once more: charming as any good prince, albeit still with that cracked edge of menace.

"What is it?" Na'ilah asked lightly. "Will any possible question you might ask us truly make any difference at all?"

"That would depend," the spy responded, sounding curious, now.

The trickster laughed softly at that, lowering his right hand away from the glass near his face, to instead stroke his daemon's head to reward her perceptiveness. He had been too eager to lash out at that particular bait.

The little spy was, perhaps, more perspicacious than he had initially credited her with. _Slipping_ , a voice hissed in his ear. _Can you last, trickster? Can you maintain that briar patch you have made of your mind to keep us out? You do so. keep._ ** _slipping_** , it snarled.

Loki blinked twice very deliberately to banish it; although he could feel that it took more than his own effort to do so; Na'ilah reached out across the bond as subtly as she could, to aid it. _Not subtle enough_ , a hiss of a voice more like his own warned, and he banished **that** even more quickly. _Slipping, indeed_. "So what, then, jaded little spy, do you really wish to learn of me?"

Natasha considered. "For a god of lies, it took you longer than I thought it would to catch on. Are you feeling okay?" she asked politely.

Loki rolled his eyes briefly. "Now you're just being patronizing."

"Funny, from the jackass who just referred to me as a _child at prayer_. Not that _that_ didn’t sound like you were speaking from _experience_ , but I sense that that’s a tender subject, with you.” She narrowed her eyes as his mirth only increased. _That’s the source of_ some _of the cracked-ness then_. “Or it was, before you overcame it by necessity.” She smiled just a little at the way his poison-green eyes narrowed, then, just a little too suspicious, beginning already to read her better, and seek out new places to stab with greater accuracy. “Maybe it’s just the familiar totalitarian territory, but some of it was also pretty similar to some of the more _emotive_ tidbits from your speeches about the _great lie that freedom is_. Do you really think Fury bought that?"

"He smelled awfully close to soiling himself," Na'ilah mused.

"He is American, is he not? People in this region do so value the supposed importance of that, I’ve noticed. _You_ know all about _their_ weak points, of course," Loki added. "His, the golden Captain's, and even Anthony Stark's."

"You seem pretty interested Stark," said the spy. "Both of you."

Loki's smile went quicksilver and coldly mocking again. "Do we? How marvelous." He smiled cheekily at his daemon, as though he were genuinely thrilled to find out about this new rumor. Na’ilah leveled an unimpressed glare at him in response, but he could discern some affection in it, however reluctant.

Natasha gave him points for the misdirect. "So that's one of your plays, but not the one we have to look forward to the soonest, then."

"Had we met under different circumstances, I would consider becoming a patron god of yours, but I sense someone _else_ is already looking out for you," Loki said suddenly. "Is she not?"

At that, the spy froze, staring at him as though across a vast distance. Her daemon's claws extended, then slowly retracted. "I've still only met two gods so far."

"For one: do not lie to a god of lies.” He smiled wide and sinfully delighted again at how she frowned almost a little petulantly, at that. “For another: I do not speak of another _god,_ nor _goddess_. You know precisely of whom I speak, Agent Romanoff. She is _such_ a fan of those who train into themselves so many thousands of ways to take another's life, after all, and you do have it down to an art, so I’ve heard.”

"So do you. I hear you almost managed to take out half the population of another planet," she shot back.

"Like recognizes like. I should have seen sooner that you were one of her little favorites." His smile was cold, and said without words, _And so am I_.

She shook her head. "I don't know who you're talking about," she insisted.

“Barton didn’t know about the hospital fire,” Loki said coldly. “He still does not. For now. I will have the grace, at least, to leave that up to your own discretion.”

Natasha visibly paled, and her hands slowly clenched into fists despite her efforts to remain unmoving, except for her perfectly even breaths, which notably did not hitch or waver in the least.

Until the trickster’s daemon purred, "She's a harsh mistress, is Death.”

"She's _nothing_ to do with this," the spy snapped.

Loki's smile turned bitter, but in a more genuinely sad, regretful sort of manner. "Now, I do wish that were true even more than you do, for if it were, I would not be here." The smile had a dead look to it, then, devoid of verve entirely, and hollowed out.

Na’ilah’s fur stood all on end for just a moment, like she had suffered a shock, but she smoothed it down again almost immediately; although not in time to avoid the spy’s attention when Natasha looked to her questioningly.

The panther stared back at her, the tip of her tail flicking back and forth, but no other movement or twitch of expression gave any further insight into what she might be thinking. She was even more of an enigma than the god, and that unnerved still more.

"How?" Natasha asked.

"I would recommend perhaps asking her yourself, but she really is the _quiet type_ ," Loki remarked. "What will you tell your superiors about her, now they will be asking you? How will you begin to explain?"

"This is off the record. Stark made sure of that," she said, smiling bright and charming.

Loki's brow furrowed. "What?"

"It's good to have almost a name to look into. I'll bet Thor has heard of her. From there, I’m sure it won’t be difficult to discern who it is you’re offering the tesseract to." She inclined her head a little. "Thank you, for your cooperation," she countered, then turned on her heel and strode away, her lynx daemon following close behind her.

The trickster stared after her, more disconcerted than he wished to admit. "Damn."

"I think I like her, though," Na'ilah murmured.

Loki shot her a disapproving look.

"Oh like you didn't have fun, too."

"Only because you intervened on time." He looked at her very sharply, then, almost like he was fully present again, behind those familiar green eyes. _Almost_. "You mustn't let me forget how important you are, to me."

"I won't," she assured, glancing up at him with only a little more wariness before. "Though it becomes more difficult."

He swallowed tightly. "Oh."

"Don't dwell on it."

"I know," he said, very softly, rubbing at his eyes with one hand for a few moments, before turning and sitting again on the bench. This time, Na'ilah perched there beside him, again in wolf-shape, letting him settle one arm about her and rest his chin atop her head when she nuzzled at him gently. "Barton runs late. Why?"

"The Beast is avoiding the scepter."

He made a thoughtful noise. "Why?"

Na'ilah considered briefly, then lied, "I know not." It almost physically pained her, that he could not detect the falsehood. That they were no longer lying to people _together_ properly, this time. Seeing no echo of it across Loki’s face made her feel ill, as well.

That, at least, Loki still remained in tune with, and felt ill enough himself––worried more than he would admit about the delays––to share the sensation with her as naturally as the rest _should_ have been to him. "Perhaps he needs to be lured closer."

"I have arranged for it."

"Good." He smirked a little, proud and a bit unspeakably relieved. He did not ask her when or how she had made such plans. In fact, he may have muttered a familiar, very simple charm of short-term-memory banishment. Its duration wouldn’t remove any of his conversation with the spy, and it allowed his daemon to drop in an abridged version of their conversation (just a vague list of the important details, nothing more) where the intact memory had once been.

It had been tricky, arranging for the five-minute delay upon the transmission of data from his mind to the scepter, but worth every drop of blood, sweat and tears it had cost them, and more than that besides.

The necessity of his selective memory, too, felt wrong to his daemon, but at least it was also reassuring. He trusted her, even when she was fully capable of lying to him, despite their bond, and willing to entrust her still with knowledge he would not let Thanos’ watching eyes have time to glimpse before he erased it. It was, perhaps, the greatest show of trust the trickster had ever given another being.

Of _course_ he would only give it to another facet of his own soul bonded to him for the rest of their natural lives, but that wasn't what mattered, just then.

 _Just a bit longer_ , Na'ilah thought quietly, just to herself this time.

 

~~

 

Natasha “happened” to meet them at an agreed-upon point where the path from the bridge of the helicarrier to the lab Tony occupied happened to converge upon the path Natasha was taking to the very same place.

"Dr. Banner," she said quickly. "Returning to the lab?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"It might be best if you don't, actually," she said. "Loki's up to something, and he's hoping to provoke you. That scepter might influence you even with him locked away back there." By that point, they could see the lab ahead.

Same as earlier, when they had tested while Tony worked on pre-emptively evacuating a large swathe of Manhattan, Bruce could feel a faint pressure from all sides squeezing his brain a little, but nothing like the piercing, jabbing sort of sensation it had been earlier. He took a barely-notable half-step back, and the pressure went away entirely. "Look, I've got it under control here. We're just going to see how Tony's... what the heck is that gun-thing Captain Rogers is carrying?"

Tony chose that moment to step out of the lab. "I see you found Phase 2!" he called to the soldier, who seemed to see first that Tony had spotted him, and second the group at the end of the hall. Banner stayed where he was, but Natasha and his body language both, as well as Steve's change in direction as he headed straight for Fury, moved everyone else closer to the door, and to Tony, who had thoughtfully moved the scepter closer to the wall most of their marks were now standing near, except Bruce.

The inventor managed to reach Nick first only by running instead of marching, and grinned at him. “Hey, Nicky. Got a question or several hundred for you.”

The Director clearly didn't like where this was going. "What are you doing, Mr. Stark?"

"I’ve kind of been wondering the same thing about _you_ ," the engineer mused.

"You're supposed to be locating the Tesseract," Fury reminded.

"We are," Banner said quickly. "The model's locked and we're sweeping for the signature now. When we get a hit, we'll have the location within half a mile."

"And you'll get your cube back, no muss, no fuss,” Tony promised, a bit too mockingly, his smile all too toothy. “Sooo, you feel like explaining _Phase 2_?"

Steve appeared to the inventor's left, holding up the weapon he'd discovered, and declared, "Phase 2 is S.H.I.E.L.D. uses the cube to make weapons." He then added an aside to Stark, "Sorry, the computer was moving a little slow for me."

"Oh ye of little patience. I found this stuff half an hour before you dragged that in."

The soldier shot him a look that pleaded with him to please be serious, but the inventor only arched an eyebrow, because dammit, he'd still found out first.

"Rogers, we gathered everything related to the Tesseract. This does not mean that we're-"

Tony coughed. "I'm sorry, Nick, but, uh," He raised the StarkTablet from where he'd held it tucked under one arm, revealing the same plans he'd shown the spy and the biochemist earlier, in a more publicly-sharable size format: the one of the tesseract-enhanced warheads and their related missile schematics. "What were you lying?"

Aysel, once more draped loosely about his neck, snorted at him, and was subsequently ignored by most of them.

The super-soldier chimed in, "I was wrong, Director. Plenty of things in the world clearly haven't changed a bit."

Bruce raised a hand. "I think all of us would like to know why exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the Tesseract to build weapons of mass destruction.”

At that, Nick declared, in tones of resignation, "Because of _him_ ," and jabbed a finger in Thor's direction.

The god blinked a couple of times. "Me?"

"Last year Earth had a visitor from another planet who had a grudge match that leveled a small town," Fury explained further. "We learned that not only are we not alone, but we are hopelessly, _hilariously_ , outgunned."

"My people want nothing but peace with your planet," the thunder god protested.

"But you're not the _only people_ out there, are you? And, you're not the only _threat_ , either. The whole world's filling up with people who can't be matched; they can't be controlled. Many of them mean well, but plenty don't, and often even some of those who do make occasional catastrophic errors of judgement." He gestured toward Tony illustratively.

"Hey!"

"At least, they do before they wise up and figure out how to be less of an ass, if only infinitesimally so," the Director added further.

" _Oh_ , you meant pre-Stane-death, right, right. Go on," Tony sighed.

Aysel might have lifted her face just enough to visibly roll her eyes at him.

"Also the time you were dying of Palladium poisoning," Natasha pointed out.

At that, the inventor winced.

"We helped you in what ways we could, to stabilize and reclaim control over your then-wreck of a life, yes. That's what we do," Fury concluded. “Though for the likes of you, there’s only so much more one can _do_.”

Tony frowned, but couldn’t really argue that.

"Like you ‘controlled’ the cube?" Steve suggested, dryly full of doubt.

"It was your work with the Tesseract, and the experiments you strained it with, which drew it to the attention of Loki to it, and his dangerous allies. It is the signal to all the realms that the Earth is ready for a higher form of war," Thor boomed.

Steve made a face. "Really? A higher form? I thought you were supposed to be advanced in more than just technology, Thor?"

"You forced our hand," Nick said to the big blond god. "We had to come up with _something_.”

"A _nuclear deterrent_ ,” Tony cut in, sarcasm dripping, “because _that_ always calms everything _right_ down. Nat, why do you still work for this guy?"

She made a face like she might be starting to wonder.

"Remind me again how you made your _fortune_ , Stark?” Fury inquired.

Steve shook his head negatively. "Look, I'm sure if he still made weapons, Stark would be neck deep-"

"Wait! Wait! Hold on! How is this now about _me_?" Tony snapped, though as he said it he felt Aysel beginning to grow suddenly more alert and observant, her muscles tensing and pulse quickening.

Her ears were also twitching just slightly, in tandem with the way that she kept flicking her eyes from person, to person, to god, to daemon, to person, to the rest of the daemons, and then back around again––more than once. She was always good at threat-assessment, after all. Her assessment was overloaded with a flood of data that left her breathless as her bonded human’s adrenaline spiked.

Especially once she heard Steve respond, "I'm _sorry_ , isn't _every_ thing?" and she knew that Tony himself had found his chosen target for his next acerbic barb.

Clearly, he was now distracted, so his daemon sat up enough to keep track of the rest of the rising susurrations of bickering that soon picked up. She could also feel a prickling and uncomfortable sensation as the scepter began to feed off of the emotions and tempers now beginning to run higher, the tension closer to snapping outright.

She vaguely heard, "I thought humans were more evolved than this,” from Thor, which she honestly gaped at in disbelief.

“You _cannot_ be serious,” the fox growled.

"Excuse me, did _we_ come to _your_ planet and _blow stuff up_?" Nick shot back.

That was when the increase in volume peaked, and suddenly all of them were speaking over each other, all of them now close to panic, but also full of anger.

Said Thor, "You speak of control, yet you court _chaos_!"

Aysel had the perfect comment for that, and opened her mouth to utter it, but Tony quietly shut her mouth for her with two gentle fingertips pressing on the top of her muzzle and the underside of her jaw both. The only reasons that she didn’t bite him, were: that he took measures like this far less frequently than ever she stopped him rambling with paws against his face, and because his touch was lacking in actual force enough to make her genuinely pause and reconsider.

If only to herself, she admitted that her comment about Loki's sex appeal probably _wouldn’t_ be appropriate. Once she had dismissed the idea, he let go.

"It's his M.O., isn't it?" Bruce cut in. "I mean, what are we, a _team_? No, no, no. We're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're... we're a time-bomb." He might have stepped a bit closer, his eyes flickering a bit green. He didn't feel sharp pain, in his head this time, from the scepter, so much as a whirlwind, focusing around all of them, paying each individual mind very little focused attention, instead feeding into their collective emotions. It was a hell of a _rush_ , but that was just as perilous, in its own ways, comparable to rage.

Fury looked a little alarmed. "You need to step away."

That was when the machismo twins took back over, and Aysel struggled not to bite either of them, particularly when there was touching. She did not approve of the touching. She was too close to Captain- _bloody_ -Rogers to be comfortable with arm-touching here. This was why being handed things was a problem, too; _no bueno_.

"Why shouldn't they guy let off a little steam?" Tony proposed.

"You know damn well why! Back off!" Steve argued.

The inventor's smile went decidedly mocking. "Oh, I'm starting to want you to make me."

The fox across his shoulders looked down at the super-soldier’s daemon, who seemed perplexed and increasingly worried, as the argument progressed. Similarly, the rest of the daemons in the room were looking either confused by their bonded humans’ states, or outright fearful in the case of Cacia and Zada, who had a better idea what was happening to the minds they were bonded to.

 _They’ll come back to themselves,_ Aysel reminded herself, even as her claws dug into Tony’s shirt to maintain her balance, catching and stretching some of the threads.

"Yeah, big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?"

"Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist."

Natasha gave a thoughtful shrug, at that, like she really couldn't disagree with the assessment, there, nor deny the righteousness of the quip’s sass.

"I know guys with none of that worth ten of you. I've seen the footage. The only thing you really fight for is yourself. You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you."

"I think I would just cut the wire."

"Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.”

"A hero, like you? You're a laboratory experiment, Rogers. Everything special about _you_ came out of a bottle.”

"Put on the suit, let's go a few rounds.”

Izzy pawed at Steve then, and barked.

The super-soldier seemed confused by the sound for a moment, then shook his head a bit and looked down at his daemon. “What?”

“The hell are you doing?” the dog hissed. “You sound like a complete jerk!”

“What?” Steve asked, sounding hazy.

Thor shook his head at them, almost amused, but there was a hint of blood-thirst in his stare that clearly had no place here, and no excuse to be there, without the scepter's influence to feed it as he rumbled, "You people are so petty, and tiny."

Bruce cut in, "Yeah, this is just terrific, why-"

Fury began, in a lower tone, "Agent Romanoff, would you escort Dr. Banner back to-”

"Where?" Banner crowed, suddenly amused. "You're _renting_ my _room_."

"The cell was just-"

"In case you needed to kill me, but you can't! I know, I tried."

The others fell quiet, then, staring, daemons, humans, gods and otherwise alike.

Banner shrugged a little. "I got low. I didn't see an end, so I put a bullet in my mouth and the other guy spit it out. So I moved on, I focused on helping other people. I was good until you dragged me back into this freak show and put everyone here at risk. You wanna know my secret, Agent Romanoff? You wanna know how I stay calm?" He snarled.

They were all interrupted by a very loud guitar riff from the tablet Tony was still holding.

"Get that, please, would you, dear?" Aysel snapped quickly, "before you all _embarrass yourselves_ further."

"Sorry, kids. You don't get to see my party trick after all," Bruce muttered, stepping closer to Tony and the tablet. "We got a lock on the tesseract?"

"Yeah. Was the 'Crazy Train' clip too obvious for how bad this news is?"

"How bad what new..." Then the biochemist got a closer look at the readings and his eyes went very wide. Plucking the tablet from Tony's hands he muttered, "Oh, my God!" just as Natasha stepped closer and reached for his arm.

Then all Hell broke loose as Barton and company crashed into the helicarrier, starting with an explosive arrow that blew out one of the engines, and also collapsed half the floor under the lab, taking Bruce and Natasha down to a level below it with a crash and sending the rest of them scrambling.

“Armor. Now!” Aysel snapped, clinging to Tony for dear life. “Capsicle, help us out, here!”

Steve nodded and hauled the inventor upright, helping propel him out the door, while Fury shouted orders and Thor started dislodging himself from a pile of debris.

It was all downhill from there.

 

~~

 

Every hair on Na’ilah’s body stood on end when the piercing roar of the Hulk rattled through the whole of the helicarrier along with the shrill scream of his also-transformed daemon, and upon seeing the serenely, almost numbly malevolent smirk that curled Loki’s lips back from his teeth, she shuddered.

This had been her least favorite part of this plan.

They would be falling. Again. If they weren’t careful.

It should be fine. Really.

Just so long as the watching Other still believed them integral to Selvig’s machinery’s functions, and Barton’s resources. If not, then Loki might well be targeted by his own should-be servants. Na’ilah very carefully avoided thinking about that. She didn’t want to give off any too-anxious emotional signals her bonded mage might slip knowledge of to his masters. She could still hope their initial time-delay on data transmission was still in effect, but the spell was growing frayed, and would only grow more so until the portal opened and the focus of the Other would shift in scope from a single god to the myriad figures of a densely crowded battleground. She also couldn’t be sure, with the Other’s focus now fixed back on the scepter again so single-mindedly, that Loki would even remember to erase certain bits of memory in time, anymore.

So she had to focus on completing the next crucial steps of their plans.

Especially since it was her job to retrieve the abhorrent scepter, in the wake of the explosion around it.

She appeared in the wreckage too close to Thor and scrambled away quickly before he noticed, snapping up the scepter in hew jaws––still in her wolf-shape as she was––and vanishing herself away, reappearing back in Loki’s cell. She held out the scepter to the trickster, and dropped it with visible disgust when he accepted it. “Time to get out then,” she said.

“Hmm. Wait until they see the beast off.”

“Of course.” That was the second-most uncomfortable part of this plan: Thor.

Na’ilah did love the ridiculous oaf, as much as she resented how blind he could be to the ways that people spoke of his brother, the very moment that the Thunderer’s back was even slightly turned. She resented feeling let down by it, and less strong for his doubt, and she loathed him for making her feel that poison in both hers and Loki’s minds again: the poisonous belief that monstrousness really _might be_ all they had, within their hearts, and that it might be terrible.

Again, she summoned Loki’s memories, just a few, surreptitiously to herself; just enough to evoke the strength of conviction that the pair of them always felt, when they reminded themselves that Asgard considered Hel and Fenrir to both be monsters.

Monstrous may be the shared heart of Loki and Na’ilah, but monsters love as passionately as any other creatures with hearts and eyes and brains enough to feel happiness, fear, desire, and greed too. If monsters such as they were considered “evil” to Asgard, then let Loki Lie-smith be as evil as ever they accused him of being. As evil and purely monstrous as ever they accused Jotunns of being, in order to justify their treatment of them in the wake of that long-dead war. So few of them seemed to recall Jotunnheim as it had been before Laufey’s time, and that more than a few of them were a bit Jotunn by blood themselves, too.

And Odin had never sought to address it, or to heal those poisoned ideas from the mindset of his whole kingdom, instead allowing those sentiments to continue to fester and become mythic over time, all while Loki grew up studying the truth of history and perpetually coming into conflict with other Aesir scholars and mages as a result of what studies he chose to pursue, what passions and what styles of mystic arts. All while Loki had been considered effete and _argr_ for his shape-shifting as a result of that poison, and vilified and criminalized even before he was fully mature, suffering abuses that nearly brought Thor to kill a few of his harassers, until they better learned to avoid his notice, and leave no physical evidence behind.

And in all that time, he never dared tell Loki that perhaps the reason that the magics and cultures of pre-ice Jotunnheim might perhaps resonate with him particularly because Loki himself was Jotunn, and shaped just a little by some of those ancient magics before he was even born. He never dared suggest it.

Never dared tell little Loki that his ancestors had been more powerful than even Borr. _Now why might that be?_

It was about time he stopped bothering to feign tameness. Thor was far too old for this trickster and his daemon to keep minding after him like a sheepdog which has somehow learned to make matador of itself enough to herd a mad bull away from causing interplanetary warfare to break out between Asgard and any of the other realms he might fancy visiting for the sake of some vain quest.

No, leave that ridiculous dynasty of the Aesir’s kings to rot.

Loki planned to write his own tales, as ever he was wont to do, but now he no longer felt beholden to Asgard, to his kin there. Soon Odin would find out just what that meant for him, having failed this Lie-smith and wounded him so deeply too.

Thus when the Hulk was dispatched, he quietly freed himself from his glass prison, leaving an illusion of himself behind and his own true self invisible––the simplest of spells, really, were illusions: requiring fairly little energy, due primarily to light being such a playful and malleable matter through which to weave magic. Then he waited until he could hear the distinct loud thumping of a fast-approaching and frantic thunder god.

The cage door thus swung open at just the opportune moment, and Thor leapt through it with a yell, disturbing and dissipating the illusion-Loki upon contact, just before the cage snapped shut behind him. Na’ilah teleported herself out a second later. He hauled himself back up to his feet moments later, and met the stare of the non-illusory Loki, who then stood before him fully visible and looking at his fair brother’s face with his mouth thinned and the look in his eyes apparently caught between disbelief and mild disdain, as he asked, “Are you ever _not_ going to fall for that?”

_CRACK!_

Of course the response was a hammer-blow to the Hulk-proof glass. “ _Very mature, Thor, as always_ ,” said Loki’s daemon.

 _Chthk––rrrrrnnk_ , went the support-system holding the cage suspended.

“Oh now that sounds ominous doesn’t it,” Na’ilah mused.

Thor looked suddenly crushed, staring at her, and she tried to ignore it.

Loki, on the other hand, sniggered and grinned brightly at the trapped Thunder god, as he back-stepped toward the nearby control panels (followed by his daemon, who seemed to be watching his face almost as intently as Thor was) and mused, “The humans think us immortal.” His fingers twitched thoughtfully as he looked over the controls for a second before cheerfully adding, “Shall we test that?”

He was then cut off by the sound of his nearest minion being incapacitated, and a small-seeming mortal man in a well-fitted suit, holding a very large weapon-like device aimed right at Loki’s head, who proceeded to say, “Move away, please.”

Holding the man’s stare, Loki wove another illusion and left it behind him again, as his true self stepped away, neither seen nor heard, as he brandished the scepter.

The illusion held up both hands from the panel and took a couple of very slow steps away from it, with an utterly calm look upon its face, as Coulson inquired, “You like this?” and gestured with the gun.

The illusion kept staring.

Na’ilah very carefully did not look towards Thor, also seeming to focus on the false-Loki; although she could easily see through the illusion, herself, and sense where Loki truly stood in the room.

“We started working on the prototype after you sent the Destroyer,” the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent continued, then shrugged. “Even I dunno what it does.” A small motion the mortal made caused the end of the gun to appear molten-hot, and very reminiscent of the Destroyer. “Wanna find out?”

There followed a sharp, wet and hollow sound, and a choked-off breath, then a slight wheeze, all from within Phil Coulson’s chest. Thor bellowed in rage and blood soaked Loki’s scepter, and got a bit on his armor as well.

Loki sloughed the mortal off his weapon and onto the ground, then stepped around him, and kept walking, back towards the controls.

Thor’s vision tracked him, unwavering even as he fairly shook with wrath.

Sensing it, Loki made a show of inspecting the blood all over his scepter as though annoyed by it, and shooting his brother an exasperated look and a gesture like he couldn’t believe the mortal had the nerve to leave such a stain behind, then grinned again, seeing Thor’s emotional flush fall into a paler, fiercer sort of anger.

Ah, at last, to be considered a real threat. That was refreshing. In the past, he tried so much _milder_ methods of keeping Thor’s ego in check, but it never truly _had_ sunk in, for the Thunderer, just how much more powerful his brother’s mastery of mage-craft had truly become, in the past several centuries. It hadn’t seemed clear to anyone at all, in Asgard, just how vital and powerful was the trickster they would so carelessly use as the Realm Eternal’s perpetual scape-goat, fixer-of-incredible-messes in crises considered too _distasteful_ for the likes of Odin; although at first, Loki had thought them less ignorant of it.

He had not realized that they were so uninformed, or even outright misinformed, as to blame him for every mess he was ever sent out to repair; many of them were, but those which were not had all been worse, and had been Thor’s fault as well, but still only Loki bore the blame, in the public eye of Asgard. No wonder all had turned against him in suspicion the moment he accepted Frigga’s plea to take the throne in Thor’s absence.

How long it had taken him to see that he had been kept not as an artifact of war, over time, but as foil for Thor, to make a better king of him? About halfway through his fall into the void, perhaps, had been enough. So much time to stare into the worst of all things within his own memories...

Loki had some feelings about the whole matter, which he wanted to express as succinctly as possible, and in order to do so, he manipulated the controls, then held his adopted brother’s gaze for a long moment, savoring the Thunderer’s powerlessness. It was sweeter than he’d anticipated, and yet... soured quickly. A pity.

Then he sent Thor plummeting down to Earth, and then almost snorted at himself, for once more being responsible, albeit in a more literal manner than in past, for _grounding_ the Thunder god.

As he felt Na’ilah brush against his knee, in wolf-form again, he flicked his hand up from the control, then turned to step away. That seemed to become too sour too fast. Why was that? It didn’t make sense. Did it? _Slipping_. He almost winced, but was distracted quickly.

“You’re gonna lose,” Phil said.

As the villains turned back toward the bleeding mortal, the agent’s daemon noticed how differently both of them reacted: the god looking blank and almost uncomprehending, but while his daemon’s demeanor was stiff and she moved in time with Loki’s movements, she was still bristled and her eyes were more wide almost in terror, far more so than her mage’s look should have merited, unless they were missing something.

“Am I?” Loki asked, in a softly acid tone.

“It’s in your nature.”

Taking a step closer to him, then another, the god remarked, “Your heroes are scattered, your floating fortress falls from the sky; where is my disadvantage?”

Na’ilah stayed very, very still, watching her mage very carefully.

Phil concluded damningly, “You lack _conviction_.”

Loki started to protest, “Well I-”

The human pulled the gun’s trigger.

_BZZOOOUUMMNNK_

The trickster crashed through the far wall in an explosion of light and molten heat that looked very uncomfortable, and sounded it based on the shriek that escaped Na’ilah as she ran after him with haste, shaking off the damage even as she did so, she needed closer proximity to rid herself completely of the sensation of burning.

Loki managed to pull himself upright enough in time to catch her up in his arms just as she shifted into feline form, and clung to him. She then vanished them both, desperate for this to end, and when she looked up they stood amidst the ranks of their allies now lining up around them in the planned meeting place Loki had requested they convene. They were still following Loki’s plan. There was even one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents he had tapped with the scepter, leading them.

The trickster’s daemon exhaled a sigh of relief so ragged at the sight that she felt like she might melt with it, and Loki frowned at her a little. She only shook her head at him a little. All attention was upon them again from the Other, and perhaps even Thanos too now, and Na’ilah could feel it itching at the back of her own mind and grit her teeth, able to see, but not feel with him, that Loki himself felt some of it far worse.

Time to begin the war then.

“Move out!” Na’ilah snapped, and was relieved further still when Loki’s feet marched into action as obediently as those of the others. _Just a bit longer_ , she thought only to herself, as quiet as she could.

 

~~

 

In the end, Natasha had gotten her pet archer back; Thor had been dropped out of the sky; the Hulk launched himself out, seeking a brawl with a provocative fighter jet; and Phil Coulson had gotten himself killed by an angry god.

Steve and Tony got just enough repairs done, under fire, to keep them in flight.

Loki was gone, his daemon with him. Na’ilah had left note for Aysel to find, low on the corner of the Iron Man transport crate, confirming that Stark Tower, in New York City, had sounded like an ideal battleground to the god of chaos. She styled it like an elegant invitation to an extremely important party, of course, because she was as twisted as the mage she was bonded to, in her humor.

Once she and Tony were free of armor and he had started what repairs could be started before they were inevitably dragged into some debriefings, Aysel sprawled out on the nearest clear horizontal surface to the fastidiously working inventor. She tugged an ice-pack someone had left with Tony closer to herself and tucked her head under it with a grumble.

"Can't believe he dropped fkin' Thor," she growled out from under it.

"He'll be back."

"And Bruce, too? Er... Hulk? And his iridescent-yet-oddly-intangible Raging Kea of Death daemon... Does she have a different name too, do you think?"

The inventor shot her a look.

She growled a bit petulantly at him.

"We can ask later."

"Assuming he finds a way to NYC somehow. Where'd we even lose him, anyway?"

"He'll make it."

"You don't know that."

"Don't I? Why don't you?"

She huffed, clearly frazzled. "Because nothing is ever that easy."

"I don't think it'll be exactly easy for them to get there when it's time, but I think they'll make it."

"JARVIS, tell him he's a crazy person," Aysel insisted.

"I believe that fact to be self-evident," the AI responded, from speakers in the Iron Man armor's storage unit.

"See?" the fox insisted.

"In this case, however, the trackers placed upon Mr. Odinson’s armor, and one of the blueberries Dr. Banner consumed, both so far remain intact."

Aysel sat up sharply. "What?"

"Bruce was the tricky one, yeah."

"You complete bastard, you had me _worried_!"

He grinned at her. "Ye of little faith."

"Well, to be fair, look at the gods I've met."

"I dunno, you seemed to like _one_ of them."

"I don't know if I do, because currently he's crazier than a nuclear-powered bagel toaster!" she snapped.

"Na'ilah, then."

She curled up in a ball with her back to him, sulking.

He let her for about full minute before finally asking, "What's really bothering you about them, this time?"

"Same thing that always worries us before shit goes down, Pinky. I'm worried someone might actually take over the world."

Tony shook his head. "They're bringing the portal to us."

"I know," she sighed.

"And probably not opening it too far."

"I know."

"And they'll be bottle-necked. It's pretty much as ideal as we can get for something like this. With most civilians already cleared out, or being evacuated even now, and most of our aliens all in once place-"

"We dunno how to unhook him."

Tony considered. "Well, _we_ don't. You really think they don't have a few ideas between the two of them?"

"Depends on how willing he is to listen."

"I think, at that point, she probably won't give him a choice."

"I shouldn't even care," the fox growled.

"Well, I can't say it's looking to be one of your _better ideas_ , just so far, but..."

"What if I've fallen for some sort of trick, here? It's not like I've seen Na'ilah exactly swoon as embarrassingly as I've practically done. She just noticed our weird––blood things, from Afghanistan, with our bond––and wants to know more about it, and considered particular tactics easy ways to get under our guard. There's absolutely _no reason_ that I should be _this stressed out_ over a couple of alien lunatics we barely know."

The inventor set down his tools for a moment and strode up to her shelf. She was right at reactor-height, and still had her back to him. Her fur was on end like she was trying to bluff someone. Whether herself, Tony, or the rest of the world, was hard to discern. "You really think it might be a trick?"

"I don't know. The emotional whirlpool of ridiculousness the scepter made out of everybody sort of filled me with an excess of doubt and distrust and the distinct feeling of dread that I've been behaving like preschooler with a crush, for fuck's sake."

Tony snorted. "Well, you have, a little, but it's sort of been adorable."

"Fuck off."

"Look, whatever it is, whatever comes of it, I'm kind of glad I got to see this side of you, okay?"

She made a disbelieving noise.

"I mean it." He ran a hand through his hair nervously. "I mean... We both know, with Pep..."

"We do," she said softly. "And I'm also still staring some guilt in the face there. She's so perfect though that I can’t-"

"I know."

"And she just-"

"She's kind, compassionate, wryly sarcastic, dangerously clever, and terrifyingly earnest, I know."

Aysel whined. "I do love her, I swear I do. I don't need more, I swear that I don’t, that we don’t, that this doesn’t..." she trailed off helplessly.

Tony picked her up, then, and sighed when she buried her face in his neck. "I genuinely don't doubt that, because I feel the same way. You know I do."

"Just not about the idiot god," she muttered, understandably muffled.

"Well. To be fair, he's crazy."

She groaned.

"He's pretty hot, though, I'll credit your taste, there. Damn, it's been a while since I could say that about anyone male with quite such conviction, but his legs alone-"

"You can stop anytime."

"So can you. You don't have to panic. You really are behaving like it's a crush you've got. So maybe that really is all that it is, for now."

"Fuck destiny sideways with a rusty handsaw."

"You say that, but you're also the one who told me not to be a dumbass and to trust Pepper Potts, even though you couldn't explain why for over a year after we hired her. You yelled at me for over an hour until I called her as soon as I could to make sure we got her hired on that same day, and you still couldn’t explain it.” He smiled at her when she snorted.

“I was mad, though. At her, and you, and her stupidly cute caracal daemon.”

“You convinced him for the first year that you knew him that you couldn’t even remember his name.”

“... He made me feel funny and I was angry about it.”

“But you still wanted them around. Insisted.”

“Because they’re awesome, but that didn’t mean I had to admit it.”

Tony sniggered despite himself. “Wow, really?”

“You and your pigtail-pulling in that first year weren’t doing the same?”

“Yeah, okay, so I’m shocked she didn’t kill us, but the point is, that it was sure as hell worth listening to your more irrational impulses then. You can’t even begin to argue that, Ace."

She huffed. "What's that about lightning not striking twice?"

"I'm just going to remind you that you've now met an actual Thunder god."

"... Shit."

"And apparently you have a crush on his _little brother's_ daemon."

She swore a bit more, increasingly quietly.

"Also, a reminder: our eventual goal is still to catch him, chain him up, and ship him back to Asgard, and you aren't actually bothered by that idea too much."

"... I know it needs to happen, for her to get him back."

Tony blinked a bit. "You're just a bit scary-smitten. I want you to know."

"I obsess the way you obsess. Same as ever, Tone.”

“Touché.”

“If his brain being repaired and restored has the effect of making this just as uncomfortable for you as it is for me, I will savor the sweet revenge while you trip over yourself in front of a god."

"You see, this is how I know you really are _me_ , deep down."

"Because you’re a jerk."

"So are you."

"Thank you, Captain obvious."

"Pepper would _so_ laugh at this, though."

"Please shut up."

"I mean, I've never been mistaken for the more emotionally and psychologically stable of the two of us. I'm just saying. It's sort of novel. We should do this more oft-mphhmmn." He cut off when she sat up and put both forepaws over his lips.

"Stop talking."

He pushed her paws aside lightly, holding them up in a gentle grip she didn’t struggle against. "No. I'm sort of okay, you know, taking care of you too, sometimes. Being _your_ therapist."

She tried to make disapproving noises, but he kept insistently scratching between her ears until she eventually gave up and let herself be petted. "You get really sappy when I'm like this, though. Seriously, we should both be deeply embarrassed by all this coddling you keep doing." She tried to squirm.

"Because I'm you. And I know you'd only be disappointed if I let go."

Aysel visibly frowned at him for that one. "Don't go projecting your own abandonment issues, here."

" _Our_ abandonment issues."

"Is it weird that I'm sort of fine with shipping them off to be imprisoned? I feel like it's sort of contradictory, which doesn't help me."

"Maybe it's not even a romantic thing. Maybe you're just on their wavelength, sort of?"

"If so, then the rest of the accompanying emotional mess is super damn weird."

"We're dealing with a shape-shifting trickster god alien mage who is the adopted son of a king who apparently sucks at the parenting thing to levels Howard could've never ever dreamed of aspiring to, and his slightly creepy also-shape-shifty daemon, whom he obtained via mystic arts. I think there isn't anything about this situation that doesn't qualify as 'super damn weird' at the very least."

"True..."

"Now help me fix this mess a bit."

She sighed. "'Kay,” and stood up without much fuss when he set her down, trotting over to another section of the armor and starting to run diagnostics here and there on the pieces of armor furthest from Tony’s reach, directing JARVIS' automated repair arms with occasional commands.

Tony watched her for a moment, trying not to let himself dwell on how deeply surreal this entire situation felt.

"Stop staring and work, you nerd."

He chuckled at her, and started working again.

They were almost done with preliminary diagnostic scans of all components, and had finished all wiring diagnostics, by the time Maria Hill appeared, looking pale and scuffed and harrowed as Tony knew he himself did, too. The red wolf daemon at her side carried his head a bit lower than before. “It’s time, Stark. Fury wants to see you.”

“Give me another five minutes to get the automated repairs started appropriately. I’ll be then able to focus much better on other bipeds after, trust me, and it’s the fastest way to get this thing even a bit flight-worthy again, in case of any more last-minute engine repairs we might need in the next few hours.”

She considered, and gave a curt nod, watching the inventor and his daemon both work along the pieces of the Iron Man suit, as a means to distract herself from her own lingering tinnitus from the day’s fighting. It was easier to ignore the buzzing high ring, when she focused on the words of others, and this was the most she had ever heard Stark’s daemon talk. Hill mused that they were more alike than she realized, in their mannerisms, their proud posture (or was it all perpetual postur _ing_ , with them?) and self-confident-wiseass-ery, and JARVIS seemed to dryly sass both of them equally, except for his tendency to hint at alliance with Aysel whenever she requested his support in arguing against something the inventor said. The rapport of all three wits was oddly soothing to Hill’s nerves, as she quietly chuckled at them.

“Something funny to you, Hill?” Tony sounded surprised.

“It’s refreshing to see you on the receiving end of a few verbal quips yourself, for once, Stark,” she replied.

“Oh, honey, don’t you worry about a thing. I would never let this asshole off easy,” Aysel assured, though her voice echoed a little oddly, given her upper body was in the now-closed torso of the Iron Man armor, her lower half sticking out of the waist, long tail twitching a bit as she audibly huffed and muttered over something she found, which she apparently proceeded to try to tug at first with a paw, then a bit more gingerly with her jaws.

“What are you _doing_?” the inventor asked.

“Herfe’s scything wuere not on ‘na cycans.”

“What?” Hill muttered to her daemon, who shrugged, unable to translate.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear; it’s bad manners.”

“Fhyuck you.”

Tony smiled benignly at Agent Hill for a moment, like he was silently reassuring her that everything was normal. “What kind of thing?” he asked his daemon, still sounding amused.

An annoyed huff, and the sound of scrabbling paws and the slightest rip-and-then-snap of something that sounded almost like fabric followed, before the fox emerged with a small leather pouch, the cords which held it tightly shut frayed, with a few over-stretched hair-thin threads ripping audibly where they had caught on a couple of internal armor bits along the way, as Aysel lifted her head to hold up her prize. “Cloff.”

Tony blinked at her, then lied quickly, “Congratulations, you found my pouch for my bluetooth headset and earbuds. Those _were_ on the scans.”

She set the pouch down. “Then why didn’t you get them out earlier?” the fox daemon groaned, improvising off the riff of his lie with practiced ease. “Ugh.”

“Didn’t think they were vital, Ace.”

She snorted at him, picked up the pouch again, and then hopped down to go drop the bag in amongst a bunch of miscellaneous tools in one of the drawers of the Iron Man transport unit. She and Tony could find what they needed; that was good enough.) She muttered to JARVIS over it a bit, as she absently set the pouch down and pawed it open slowly. She blinked at what it revealed, uncertain what to make of the intricate silver key. The metal looked odd, somehow, but the runic inscription down the length of the spine of the key suggested a few things about why that might be. After lowering her voice enough for the nearby wolf to still be unable to hear her, she requested that JARVIS conceal the key, and make sure it was put somewhere she could access, in the armor, once repairs completed. The drawer of tools quietly snapped itself closed in response.

Aysel returned to Tony’s side just as the inventor was closing up the sections of armor into the rest of the transport unit’s relevant compartments, to the sound of machinery within the large metal crate beginning to loudly buzz and hum as the main grunt-work portions of the repairs were begun by the automated systems, and JARVIS began reviewing their specific input for places that could not fully be fixed save by hand with current resources, or which otherwise required either short-cuts, or more creative improvisation than usual.

Once done, Tony lowered one arm, palm-out for his daemon to set dainty paws on, clambering with familiar ease up to his shoulders to drape herself across them, like he was the world’s most expensive and sassy personal hammock. They both then turned to face Agent Hill. “Ready when you are,” he sighed.

She nodded, and turned to lead him back to the bridge.

 

~~

 

The ominous quiet of Fury quietly shuffling cards that looked a bit bloody around the edges, at an otherwise empty table was bad enough. Seeing Steve Rogers’ face when he showed up and sat down opposite Tony was painful. It was like listening to someone deliberately stepping on a puppy. The inventor turned a bit away from both of them, and Aysel made a low noise of disapproval that he could feel more than hear.

“These were in Phil Coulson’s pocket.”

In retrospect, Tony wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Being strong-armed, maybe, but this? This was heavy-handed guilt-tripping delivered so coldly and smoothly that it made him want to set Fury on fire. It reminded him of Stane, but the truth of it was that Fury was better at it than Stane had ever been––less sleazy, and that made Tony see red for slightly different reasons. More self-loathing ones.

“You can stop lying,” Aysel growled. “They were in his locker. Also that blood smells like it came out of a bag.”

Fury hesitated.

The fox raised her head and slid off Tony’s shoulder to stand on the table, glaring up at him, aware of how Steve bristled at her accusation of manipulative behavior, the way she’d known that he and his daemon both would. “We already have this under control, Nick. You did right calling us in before you screwed it up much worse.”

“Excuse me?” Steve asked.

“Loki’s a traitor and too much of an asshole to leave any room in his own plots for potentially having to be kind to his brother,” Tony said flatly. “So he and his daemon came up with a series of plots to go back on his deal with the asshole who’s about to give him this army, and make it blow up in their faces.”

“Why?” Fury demanded.

“Because they tortured him, of course,” Aysel said flatly. “ _Duh_.”

The director shook his head and started to ask, “Why would they-”

“You think I know the answer to that?” Tony interrupted in a flat, flinty tone. “You don’t think I ask myself that every damn day about humanity, Nick? For the past few fucking years since I had to ask that about the people who playfully half-drowned me day and night for a week in effort to _persuade_ me to build missiles for them?”

A long, chilling silence followed.

“He’s a god of lies, though,” said the fox. “They didn’t exactly trust him without certain insurance policies in place.”

Fury’s expression fell open. “It’s a play.”

“It’s a dramatic exit _par excellence_ , from an egomaniacal mage who was betrayed by Asgard,” Aysel corrected.

Tony further extrapolated, “Think about it, Nick. Asgard banished Thor here in the first place, and made it a target for Asgard’s enemies by re-establishing close association with us protectively via their crown prince, during the same time that the actions of their king somehow led Loki to turn traitor and send the Destroyer after Thor, then somehow through vague means Thor never actually explained, Loki got dropped into an abyss caused by the destruction of their bïfrost doohickey, and it spat him out into someplace out there in the galaxy far from here where there’s someone who bargains _whole armies_ for trinkets lost, per Hydra, from _Odin’s own weapon’s vault_.” He raised both of his eyebrows pointedly. “I don’t think sending Loki back to this guy will keep him locked up for long, even if we do stop him today. Something is rotten in the state of Asgard that has to be addressed first, and I think when it does, this guy might not even be much of a threat anymore. He wants vengeance, and to make Odin pay, and considering how he and Asgard seem to have been treating the Earth lately, I think he might have a point.”

“He’s killed now over two hundred people, Stark.”

“So did I before I pulled my head out of my ass and started to repair some of the damages my ignorance and arrogance assholery did to this planet,” Tony pointed out. “As you’re both quick to remind me that I’ve done.” He widened his eyes at Nick mockingly. “His daemon came to me, Bruce, and Natasha. She asked for help.”

Aysel then added, “She’s been safekeeping most of his psyche somehow, out of the reach of whoever it is he’s running from.”

The inventor nodded and continued, “Whoever is on the other side of that portal he’s going to open is more dangerous than him, and that he took advantage of how interested this Other guy was in the tesseract, and everything he knew about it from being raised as Odin’s younger son and a mage, to bring himself back to a familiar and safer part of the galaxy, and he should be judged for making that decision and how many lives he’s taken in order to achieve it, but I think it’s much more important for us to make sure this Other guy loses interest in the Earth forever.”

“Thor was right about us messing with the Tesseract, though,” his fox sighed. “Someone would’ve come for it sooner or later. If anything, Loki might still be the lesser evil compared to who else might have been sent for us.”

“Loki knows that too, or he and Na’ilah wouldn’t be bottle-necking the invasion over a patch of New York City I’ve been having evacuated for the past couple of hours, instead of amassing all their forces and bringing them down on us at once,” Tony concluded at last.

“How are you certain he-” Steve started.

Tony threw down the invitation Na’ilah had left them.

Fury stepped closer and stared. He and the super-soldier were quiet for several long, thoughtful moments.

“You idiots are lucky we like you,” Aysel muttered.

“Hey,” the inventor said. “Don’t be rude.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t, we’ve made our point.”

She shrugged. “Fine. Sorry.”

“Stark Tower,” Steve said quietly. “How did you know he’d agree to it?”

“Loki’s playing a diva,” Izzy pointed out. “Of course Tony Stark knew all about wanting a monument to the skies with his name plastered on it, or whatever.”

The soldier shot his own daemon a slightly scandalized look.

Tony cracked up entirely into a fit of giggles. “Maybe you’re alright after all, Cap.”

“Izz!” Steve growled.

“I’m right and you know it,” the canine daemon insisted.

“Suit up, then. Both of you,” Fury sighed.

“I’ve got repairs I need to do, first. Cap? See if you can find Nat and her archer guy, and see how they’re recuperating,” Tony suggested, as he rose to his feet.

“Yes, si-” Steve said, starting to follow him out, whilst Fury gave Maria Hill orders to get eyes and ears up across all communication channels possible, as soon as possible, and the whole of the helicarrier buzzed with renewed vigor and purpose to their movements.

“No,” the inventor cut off.

“Stark,” he said, flatly annoyed again.

“Better. Much more familiar.”

“I’m sorry, for-”

“I know, I get it, just do better. There’s time to reflect later.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Very efficient. You’re still an ass,” he muttered, right before they headed separate directions down the same hall.

“So are you! Secret’s out, boy-scout!” he called towards the patriotic retreating back down the hall.

“I got kicked out of the scouts for getting into fights, Stark. Read up on your historical figures,” Cap deadpanned over his shoulder, grinning at the sound of the inventor cracking up. He sounded more like Howard, when he laughed. It was far more reassuring than Steve cared to admit, to discover that.

Tony gaped after him for a moment, then shook his head a little, and headed back towards the cargo hold where his armor awaited.


End file.
